Text Tools

About Text Tools

These are the small tools you reach for several times a week and never remember the name of. Text arrives from somewhere — a PDF, an email, a spreadsheet, a colleague — carrying formatting that has to go before it can be used: double spaces from an old style guide, line breaks in the middle of sentences, a list with duplicates in it, a heading someone typed in all caps.

Every tool in this category operates on text you paste in, in your browser, with no server involved. Results update as you type rather than behind a submit button, which matters more than it sounds: when you can see a word count move in real time, you edit differently than when you have to stop and check.

Word Counter is the most-used tool here, and worth a note on why counts sometimes disagree between applications. Word processors, social platforms and academic tools each define a word slightly differently — whether a hyphenated compound counts as one or two, whether numbers count, how footnotes are treated. Ours counts whitespace-separated tokens, which matches how most style guides and word processors behave, but if you are working to a hard institutional limit, always confirm against whatever tool will be doing the judging.

Text Tools — Frequently Asked Questions