I love the flexibility of the Atahualpa WordPress Theme Options list, but I confess to making one change to a core file outside of the Options interface. I added a line to css.php to set the font-size of the root element to 62.5% so that the body font expressed in ems could be calculated as an exact number of pixels by any browser. The default standard font size for browsers is 16px. Setting it to 62.5% ensures that 1em is exactly 10px. Obviously, 10px is too small for comfortable reading, so the body font is reset to 1.3em, exactly 13px. This is an easy way to make layouts look the same across browsers. For good measure, I like to set the line-height to 1.4 for most web pages, or 1.5 in WordPress because of the density of text.
The Atahualpa theme option for body font-size is declared as .8em, and it looks like one could simply replace .8em with 62.5% and then override it with font-size: 1.3em. Not so, because there is no way to style the root html container in the Body & Links Style option box. To enforce a reliable base font size of 62.5%/10px it is necessary to add it to the style sheet before any other font-size declarations based on ems. I know this line in css.php will need to be edited whenever the theme is updated, but it's worth the extra minute. The addition directly follows the "BASE LAYOUT" section (partially shown) below:
/* ---------- BASE LAYOUT ------------*/
html, body {font-size: 62.5%;}
body { text-align: center; /* centering ... */
... more lines of body style ...
}
After saving css.php and uploading it to the server, an "overriding" CSS style is added to Atahualpa's Body & Links Styles option box:
font: normal 1.3em/1.5 'trebuchet ms',trebuchet,geneva,arial,'DejaVu Sans','Bitstream Vera Sans',helvetica,sans-serif;
You won't see a big difference setting font-size this way, but cross-browser differences should be less noticeable, and the line-height makes masses of text look less cramped.
