I have previously written about how infuriating it is that you can’t just force WordPress to look nice.

Well, I eventually uncovered a button that allows you to noodle around with the raw CSS. I saw there was a button to edit the theme — but that’s going to get reverted next time a theme update happens. So I thought it was just impossible to fix (short of learning how to develop your own WordPress themes — which is a bit much like to get sensible rendering).

Anyway, I found the CSS button. Since cascading stylesheets can, you know, cascade, I can override the more stupid defaults from the theme. (E.g., not rendering hyperlinks, not justifying text, not using a serif font).

One of the most vexing things is that almost no WordPress themes use serif fonts, but the post editor uses a rather nice font. It’s just that when you post it, it won’t look that nice. Anyway, by using the Firefox debugger, I was able to discover that the font is called Noto Serif. So I set that as the font for my entire blog. (It took a few attempts, since there’s so many places it’s overridden. But I think I got them all!)

Now the whole blog has a nice, consistent look. But although Noto Serif looks quite nice for headings, it doesn’t look all that great for body text. I don’t know; maybe it’s just how high the X-height is. I prefer it to the sans-serif font it replaces, but it’s still not quite what I’d like.

And then I discovered that some beautiful human being has managed to convert the excellent Computer Modern font from TeX (well, technically MetaFont) into a web font. So all you have to do is downloading and jump through seventeen hoops, and now my blog looks almost as excellent as a real LaTeX document! Hallelujah!