ejwickes

No, not a developer. Just a guy wanting to publish a digital magazine whose taught himself everything up until now. From paint and canvas this artist is engaging the digital realm. I started with 2014 and made it look like it is now and have done some work in the CSS and plugin editor, but sometimes things get frustrating. The major problem is in proprietary programs that that have no universal compatibility across the board. I await any advice or recommendation. And thank you again. I’m not sure what good the validate plugin is if it won’t give me an option for correction, unless I’m missing something. Maybe this is a tool for those more up to the task of generating code on their own.
Thank you again….

Valid HTML? Not sure I know the difference between what’s valid or not. So, is this the mechanism that presents your layout consistently throughout all browsers? I went to the link and not one reference to how it works in relation to building and visiting a site that looks the same across all browsers. I’m really looking for a simple answer without all the tech jargon. Like, “Yes, this will portray your work the same on all browsers, and not bump your text out of alignment, etc.” because I don’t have a clue what W3C means or any of that. Will it do what I want it to do in simple terms or not? I’m a rookie, so you won’t insult my intelligence by putting it into layman’s terms. Is this some sort of plugin that supervises or adjusts that? Pardon my ignorance and thank you.

Hi Janet,
I’m pasting from Word document. Am I understanding your question? I’m new to this, so I’m sure I might be missing some nuance.
Essentially it’s this: Open Visual Composer, paste in my text from Word, add images, etc., columnize, try for the drop cap and justified text, update, exit to view page and generally the first paragraph loses justification. I go back into Text Editor,(because going back to Visual Composer will show me the right layout, until I update it, exit and view the page) cut [columnize]which jumped ahead of text align-justify (after update)to where it should go, to the left or behind it.Update,and there it’s not. It’s gone.
So, I gave up on text align when columnizing and just go with drop cap and left justified. Seems to stay.
Not sure why when I adjust the spacing, see it right there on the page -and then it jumps out right after exiting editor.

http://themetamodern.com/the-arts/

I might just go with the flow and forget text align. My other question would be, why does WordPress not have a simpler way to format text including indenting the first line of the paragraph? Blogging IS writing, and writers INDENT! This baffles me. Is WordPress staring a new paradigm in literacy? 😉 I’ve heard the explanation many times. Blog or print, a paragraph is a paragraph and the grammatical structure calls for indent. Who designs a writing program without an easily executed indent function? No offense! I appreciate the help.

Thank you very much for the reply,

Eric

Okay!

I know, some elements are there for layout and design purposes until I get my design tuned.
It took me a minute to see, but got the justification to work. Ross helps those who help themselves.
Now it’s on to removing the separator line between columns.

If this is something that I should start a new topic on, let me know. I don’t want to be out of line here. I’m still a virgin to WordPress Forum etiquette. I tracked down the css for that and it’s one huge paragraph of code! But within that I found this,(below) but not as neatly formatted as “elements” copy below, or “Firebug” which I got only because I thought firebug allowed you to actually edit the css right from there. It’s tough locating some of those style sheets. I thought I had it in the css, but there’s three items that refer color. I changed the one in “elements” that showed me a change on the site, but two out of three are crossed out(in “elements” view). Hex code is #e5e5e5 grey. Want to change to #fff white, or should it be #ffffff? I see it both ways from different sources. I thought I had successfully made the change after a “refresh” but later it was back. I know, so many questions, so little time…or do I just set them all to “none”? I’m almost finished totally changing the original appearance of 2014 with great perseverance and determination to get what I want.

.x-columnize {
-webkit-column-count: 2; I know what all this means…
-moz-column-count: 2;
column-count: 2;
-webkit-column-gap: 3em;
-moz-column-gap: 3em;
column-gap: 3em;
-webkit-column-rule: 1px solid #e5e5e5; But here,#fff or #ffffff or none?
-moz-column-rule: 1px solid #e5e5e5; #fff or #ffffff or none?
column-rule: 1px solid #e5e5e5; #fff or #ffffff or none?
margin: 0 0 1.313em; and I’m not touchin’ this!

But regardless, thank you for the assist with the other issues. Very helpful.

Okay!
Had the first instructional text offered to me been simply stated, i.e: [T]his is how to get a basic drop cap in short code, instead of five tutorials telling me to get short code:[drop-cap]blah[/drop-cap] and bringing up already stylized text, maybe I could have figured this out days ago.

Problem solved!