Themes don't allow styling post content

link to the problem site?

do your posts have inline styles in the content?
maybe unknown to you from copy/paste or so?

open the post in the editor in html mode and see if there are extra styles inline with the text.

My standard answer for this

If you install Firefox Firebug then when you visit your website you can immediately see the css styling plus line numbers for all those themes you tried

Move mouse slowly inside content to see the different elements styling applied and the corresponding line numbers

Thanks guys.

If that’s the case, is there anything I can do about it?

And why the hell would anybody write a theme that allows css file styling of virtually every itsy detail….EXCEPT THE CONTENT THAT IT’S SUPPOSEDLY ALL ABOUT???????

BTW I have not posted anything, just the original WordPress “Hello World” thing.

In the templates I see post content div’ed as things like “storyContent” and such, but there are no such classes or ID’s in the CSS file.

This one really makes me nuts. As you can see, I can control color, spacing, size of fonts in everything except the payoff spot–the posts themselves. Which are too small to be readable and there doesn’t seem to be be a damned thing I can do about it.
https://mayancalendargirls.com/blog/

The font size has been set in the p tag as
13px on a 16px line-height

p {
    font: 13px/16px Myriad,"Myriad Pro",Palatino,"Rotis Sans Serif",serif;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 2px;
}

Just change it to (for example) 14px/18x or overwrite it with another p tag rule.
`
p {
font-size: 14px;
line-height: 18px;
}

Thanks very much lockettpotts. That did the trick.

As you can tell, I’m new at this…and it seems that templates are getting a little harder to figure since the last ones I hacked.

And thanks to the rest of you, because this general information will be of great help to me in future.

You can just add the relevant classes and IDs in the CSS file to control anything with an ID or class on it. So the theme does already allow you to control the formatting of the content.

Read up on CSS cascasde, specificity, and inheritance: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/07/css-specificity-and-inheritance/

I promise promise promise every single aspect of your post content is very easily styled in any fashion possible.

The theme might have ID’s or Classes that aren’t in the CSS file, but you just add them. Usually there’s a ID that wraps the post content, that way anything inside can be overpowered by writing your CSS in a way where the ID is in front of the elements, so if it was a div that had the ID of content_wrapper you’d write your CSS like:

#content_wrapper p {}
#content_wrapper strong {}
#content_wrapper h3 {}
#content_wrapper .headline

and so on and so forth. The power of CSS cascade and specificity can literally let you make any element however you want.