TextForge FAQ

A1: A free word and character counter with everyday text tools around it. You paste your text once; Count, Case and Find and fix all work on that same text, and Convert, Fancy text and Make text have boxes of their own. Each tool has a tab under the heading.

A2: It is free and there is no account or registration. Like every page on ZeroDataUpload, it is supported by advertising.

A3: No. Everything you type, paste or open is read and counted by your browser on your device. The page itself, its ads and its analytics load from the internet as on any website, but what you type is never sent with them.

A4: Your text (up to 200,000 characters), the text in the other boxes (up to 200,000 characters each and 1,000,000 in all) and your settings and choices, so they are still there after a reload. Nothing is kept until you type or change something. If the browser's storage for this site is full, TextForge says so, because nothing can be kept then. Switch Keep my text off in Settings on a shared computer; Clear empties the text box.

A5: TextTransform and TextAnalyzer Pro became part of TextForge on 15 November 2026, so the site has one tool for counting, checking and changing a text instead of three; their old addresses open TextForge. Most of what they did was already here, and what only they had came along: the most used letters, taking numbers off lines, sentence lengths, a word cloud, two texts compared by their numbers and a report of the counts (questions 36 to 42). Not brought over: TextAnalyzer Pro's tone score, which guessed the tone from a list of words, its list of saved analyses, its table of typical lengths for kinds of text and its report as a data file. TextTransform's second box for the result is not needed here, because every change is made in the text itself and Undo takes it back. Parts of TextForge are also tools of their own on this site: the Text Case Converter, the Fancy Text Generator, CipherBox and the Encode / Decode converter, the Lorem Ipsum Generator, UltraPass Pro for passwords, and the text cleaner of ToolForge. Use whichever fits the job.

A6: Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on computers and phones. On a wide screen the text box and the panel of the tool sit side by side and scroll on their own; on a phone the panel comes under the text.

A7: Yes. Tab reaches every button and box. In the text box, and straight after pressing a tool's button, Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y undo and redo any change, including those made by the tools; Ctrl+S saves your text as a file. Enter confirms a goal or a limit you typed. In Find, Enter goes to the next match and Shift+Enter to the one before; in Replace with, Enter replaces one and Ctrl+Enter replaces all. While you are using the tool and not typing, ? opens the help window.

A8: A word is everything between spaces that holds a letter or a number, so "well-known" is one word and a dash on its own is none. Chinese, Japanese, Thai and other scripts written without spaces are split into words by your browser.

A9: As you see them: an emoji with its skin tone, a letter with an accent or a Hindi syllable with its vowel sign is one character, even when it is stored as several codes. More counts also shows the codes (code points), the length in JavaScript and the size of the text as a UTF-8 file.

A10: From the number of words and a speed you can change in Settings. Reading starts at 238 words a minute, the average for adults reading non-fiction silently in a review of 190 studies (Brysbaert, 2019), where most adults read 175 to 300. Speaking starts at 140; the same review gives 183 for reading aloud and 140 to 180 for audiobooks.

A11: Yes. Select part of it: the counts for the selection appear in the panel and in the text box's bar. The tools of Case and Find and fix also change only the selected part.

A12: Set a goal in words or characters, such as 500, 1.5k or 2000 characters, and a bar shows how far you are. Leave the box empty to remove it.

A13: X (280), Bluesky (300), Threads (500), Mastodon (500), Instagram captions (2,200), LinkedIn posts (3,000), YouTube titles (100 characters) and descriptions (5,000 bytes) and SMS (160, or 70). Each comes from the site's own published rules: X's counting rules and its twitter-text settings, Bluesky's post format, Meta's Threads and Instagram references, Mastodon's own software, LinkedIn Help, YouTube's reference for developers and the 3GPP standards for SMS. Choose limits shows or hides each one, and Your own limit adds any other number.

A14: X gives most letters, including Indian scripts, a weight of one and Chinese, Japanese, Korean and emoji a weight of two, and turns every link into 23 characters, however long it is. TextForge counts the same way, so a short link or an emoji can use more room than you expect.

A15: An SMS holds 160 letters when every letter is in the 7-bit alphabet phones share (English letters, digits, common signs and some accented letters); a few signs such as € and [ take two places. With any other letter, such as Hindi or an emoji, the whole message switches to 70 characters. Longer messages are sent in parts of 153 or 67, and TextForge shows how many parts there will be. A sign that takes two places is never split between two parts, so a part can end one place early.

A16: Not quite. Threads counts characters, but each emoji counts as its size in bytes, usually four. Mastodon counts characters as you see them and every link as 23; 500 is its usual limit, and some servers allow more. Bluesky counts characters as you see them and also allows at most 3,000 bytes.

A17: Only limits a site publishes are listed, so the numbers can be trusted. Google sets no fixed length for page titles and descriptions; it shortens long ones to fit the screen. For any other limit, add Your own limit.

A18: Six standard formulas for English: Flesch reading ease (higher is easier, 60 to 70 is plain English), Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index. The last five give a school year; TextForge shows their average as a class and an age. Syllables are estimated from the spelling (right for about 99 in 100 words of ordinary prose when checked against a pronunciation dictionary), so read the scores as a guide, especially below 100 words or 3 sentences.

A19: Long sentences (25 words or more) and very long ones (40 or more), both changeable in Settings, the passive voice (it was done), words ending in -ly, long words and phrases that have a simpler form (use, not utilize) and the same word typed twice in a row. Switch a check on to mark it in your text, and press its arrow to go from one to the next. Except for the sentence lengths and repeated words, the checks work on English only.

A20: They follow the plain language advice to use short, simple words, as in the US Federal Plain Language Guidelines. They are suggestions: a longer word is sometimes the right one.

A21: The words, or pairs and threes of words, you use most, with how often and their share of all words. Skip common words leaves out words such as the, and and of, in English and Hindi. Click a word to mark it in the text.

A22: Chicago (18th edition, 2024) keeps articles, and, but, for, or, nor, to, as and prepositions of up to four letters small: "A Room with a View", "Much Ado About Nothing". APA (7th edition) and AP keep every short word of three letters or fewer small. MLA keeps articles, every preposition, coordinating conjunctions and to small. Simple keeps a short list of small words small. The first and last words, and the first word after a colon, always get a capital.

A23: Short forms in capitals such as GST and NASA, words like iPhone and eBay, web and email addresses and the names you type under Names to keep as typed keep their shape in Sentence and Title Case. A line written mostly in capitals (shouting) is changed in full. Each option can be switched off.

A24: camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, kebab-case, CONSTANT_CASE, dot.case, Train-Case, path/case and flatcase. Each line is changed on its own, so a list of names becomes a list of names.

A25: Some languages change case in their own way: Turkish and Azerbaijani have a dotted and a dotless i, Dutch capitalizes IJ together, and Lithuanian and Greek have rules of their own. Choose the language so capitals follow its rules.

A26: Matches are marked in your text while you type. Choose Match capitals, Whole words, Pattern (a regular expression) and Keep capitals when replacing (cat becomes dog, Cat becomes Dog, CAT becomes DOG). Without Pattern the text is found exactly as typed, hyphens included. Type \n for a new line and \t for a tab; with a pattern, $1 puts back what the first ( ) found. Replace many at once takes one change per line, such as colour => color, or two columns pasted from a spreadsheet.

A27: A pattern can take very long on some texts and freeze the page. TextForge notes when one starts and ends; if the page was closed while one was running, Pattern is switched off at the next visit so the page does not freeze again. Check the pattern, then switch it on.

A28: Hidden characters (such as zero-width spaces), extra spaces, unusual spaces, curly quotes, long dashes, ellipsis characters, runs of blank lines, HTML tags and tabs, each with a Fix button. The indent at the start of a line is kept and is not counted as extra spaces. The buttons below fix spaces, join lines broken by a PDF or an email, make one paragraph, remove HTML tags, accents, emoji, punctuation or numbers, and turn tabs into spaces.

A29: Sort lines (A to Z, Z to A, by number, by length or shuffled), remove repeated or empty lines, number lines, add text before or after each line, join lines, split text into lines, keep or remove lines with a word or pattern, wrap long lines, reverse and trim. Sorting by number puts file-2 before file-10, and Wrap can also cut words longer than a line. The note beside the button says how many lines would change before you press it, and every change can be undone.

A30: Binary, hex, decimal and octal (by byte or by character), Base64, URL codes, HTML codes, Unicode codes in seven styles, Morse, the NATO alphabet, Braille (grade 1, English), ROT13, Caesar, Atbash, Vigenere, ROT47, A1Z26 and hidden messages. Type on either side and the other side changes as you type; Swap reads the text on the left as a code. Paste a code into the text box and TextForge says what it looks like.

A31: Yes. Play sounds the Morse at the speed and tone you choose, with an optional flashing light, and Save sound makes a .wav file. Gaps as if a slower speed keeps letters at full speed with longer gaps between them, a common way to learn Morse. Sound is made for up to 10 minutes of Morse.

A32: No. The secret is written with invisible characters inside the visible text, so anyone with a tool like this can read it: it is hidden, not locked. Some apps remove invisible characters, so test before you rely on it.

A33: Where you cannot change the font: posts, bios, names and messages. They are letters from the Unicode set, so screen readers may read them one by one or skip them and search may not find them; use them for a name or a heading, not for whole posts. The post editor styles only the words you select, and Make plain turns fancy letters back into ordinary ones.

A34: They are made with your browser's secure random numbers. The strength shows the number of bits and how long guessing would take on average at 10 billion guesses a second. A PIN is safe only where the bank or phone locks after a few wrong tries.

A35: Placeholder text in Lorem ipsum, English-like words or Hindi words, random IDs (UUID version 4, or version 7, which starts with the time), random numbers and sample names, blank characters such as the no-break space (one, or several at once), and repeated text (the box shows the start of a very long result; Copy and Save take all of it).

A36: How many of your sentences are short (1 to 10 words), medium (11 to 20), long (21 to 30) and very long (31 or more), and a line with the length of each sentence in order, from the first to the last. Writers are often advised to vary the length of their sentences; then the line goes up and down, and a stretch that stays high is a run of long sentences. The two dashed lines are the lengths you set for long and very long sentences in Settings. A text of more than 400 sentences is drawn in 400 steps, each showing its longest sentence.

A37: The twenty letters your text uses most, with their count and share. Capital and small letters count together, and a letter with its marks, such as a Hindi letter with its vowel sign or a letter with an accent, counts as one. Untick Letters only to count spaces, digits and punctuation marks too; a character that cannot be seen is shown by its Unicode number. The most used letter is the first clue in a letter puzzle or a simple cipher. A very long text is counted in its first 400,000 characters.

A38: Word cloud, below the counts, draws up to 40 of your most used words: the more often a word is used, the larger it is. Common words such as the, and, of and web addresses are left out, and the same text always gives the same picture. Save picture stores it as a PNG file of 1,600 by 880 pixels in the colours of the theme you use. The picture is made in your browser.

A39: Compare two texts, below the counts, puts your text beside a second one that you paste or open from a file: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, the average sentence, long sentences, different words, reading ease, the school class needed, the passive voice and reading time, with the difference for each, and how many different words the two share. It is made for two versions of the same piece. The second text may have up to 200,000 characters and is not kept. To see which words changed between two versions, use Compare in ToolForge.

A40: Report, below the counts, gathers the counts, the readability scores, the sentence lengths, the limits you chose, the writing checks and the ten most used words as plain text. Copy the report puts it on the clipboard and Save the report stores it as a .txt file.

A41: Yes. In Find and fix, under Lines, choose Number and then Remove numbers. It takes a number or a list mark off the start of each line: 1. 2) (3) 4: a number followed by a space, and the marks - and * and a bullet. A number that is part of the words, such as 3.5 kg or -4, stays. A line that begins with a number and a space, such as "2024 was a good year", loses that number, so read the line beside the button, which says how many lines would change. Undo takes it back.

A42: It is still in your browser. Open Settings in TextForge: when either tool left something, a part named From TextTransform and TextAnalyzer Pro offers the texts, the text boxes and up to 50 saved analyses, as one .txt file, and a button that removes them from this browser. Nothing is removed until you press it.