TextForge Help

Everything TextForge can do, step by step.

Last Updated: November 15, 2026

1. Getting Started

TextForge has six tools, each on its own tab under the heading: Count, Case, Find and fix, Convert, Fancy text and Make text. The first three share one text box: whatever you type there, Count counts, Case changes and Find and fix searches and cleans, and every change any of them makes can be undone. Convert, Fancy text and Make text have boxes of their own. Beside the tabs are two buttons: How TextForge works (a short help window) and Settings. Everything happens on this page; nothing is uploaded and there is no account. While the text box is empty, Count offers "try an example": a short text that has something for every part of Count, which Undo takes out again.

2. Your Text and Files

Type or paste into the text box, or press Open to open a file, or drop a file anywhere on the page. TextForge reads plain text in any common encoding, Word (.docx), OpenDocument (.odt), RTF and web pages (.html), Markdown, CSV, subtitles and other text files of up to 25 MB; a Word or OpenDocument file may unpack to at most 64 MB. A PDF cannot be read here: open it, copy its text and paste it. When the box already holds text, TextForge asks whether to replace it or add the file at the end.

• Undo and Redo (also Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, in the text box or straight after a tool's button) go back and forward through every change, typed or made by a tool.
• Paste pastes from the clipboard where the browser allows it, Copy copies all the text, Save (Ctrl+S) saves it as a .txt file in UTF-8, and Clear empties the box (Undo brings it back).
• The bar under the box shows the words, characters and reading time; a selection shows its own counts at the top.

3. Counting

Count shows words, characters (and characters without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, reading time and speaking time. A word is everything between spaces that holds a letter or a number; Chinese, Japanese, Thai and other scripts without spaces are split into words by your browser. A character is what you see as one sign, so an emoji or a Hindi syllable with its vowel sign counts once. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or Hindi danda followed by a space, but not after a short form such as Dr. or e.g., and a line break ends one unless the next line carries on in small letters.

Reading time uses 238 words a minute and speaking time 140 unless you change them in Settings. 238 is the average for adults reading non-fiction silently found by a review of 190 studies (Brysbaert, 2019), where most adults read 175 to 300; the same review gives 183 words a minute for reading aloud and 140 to 180 for audiobooks. Set a goal in words or characters, typed as 500, 1,500, 1.5k or 2000 characters, to see how far you are; Enter confirms it.

4. Limits for Sites and SMS

Limits shows how much room is left for each site you choose, counted the way that site counts, from its own published rules:

• X: 280, where most letters, Indian scripts included, count once, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and emoji twice, and every link 23 (X's counting rules and its twitter-text settings).
• Bluesky: 300 characters as you see them and at most 3,000 bytes (Bluesky's post format).
• Threads: 500 characters, each emoji counted as its size in bytes (Meta's Threads reference).
• Mastodon: 500 characters as you see them, each link 23 (Mastodon's own software); some servers allow more.
• Instagram caption: 2,200 characters, at most 30 hashtags and 20 @ tags (Meta's Instagram reference).
• LinkedIn post: 3,000 characters (LinkedIn Help).
• YouTube: a title of 100 characters and a description of 5,000 bytes, where letters outside English take 2 to 4 bytes each (YouTube's reference for developers).
• SMS: 160 letters of the 7-bit alphabet phones share, where a few signs such as € and [ take two places, or 70 characters when any other letter is in the text; longer messages go in parts of 153 or 67 (the 3GPP standards TS 23.038 and TS 23.040). A sign that takes two places is never split between two parts, as the standard says, so a part can end one place early.

Choose limits shows or hides each one; Your own limit adds any number of characters. Limits a site does not publish, such as an Instagram bio, are not listed, and Google sets no fixed length for page titles and descriptions.

5. Readability and Writing Checks

How easy it is to read gives six standard scores for English: Flesch reading ease (1948; higher is easier, 60 to 70 is plain English), Flesch-Kincaid (1975), Gunning fog (1952), SMOG (1969), Coleman-Liau (1975) and the Automated Readability Index (1967). The last five give a school year, and their average is shown as a class and an age on a scale from easy to hard. Syllables are estimated from the spelling: checked against a pronunciation dictionary of English, the estimate is right for 99 in 100 words of ordinary prose, and for 93 in 100 of the dictionary's own 117,000 words, many of them names. Below 100 words or 3 sentences the scores are only a rough guide, and they cannot judge whether a text is clear or correct. For text mostly in another language the scores are not shown.

Writing checks mark long and very long sentences (25 and 40 words unless changed in Settings), the passive voice, words ending in -ly, long words with a simpler form and the same word typed twice. Switch a check on to mark it in your text; its arrow goes to the next one. The simpler words follow the plain language advice to use short, simple words; they are suggestions.

6. Sentence Lengths, Most Used Words and Letters, and More

Sentence lengths shows 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), with the share of each, and under them a line with the length of every sentence in order. The two dashed lines are the lengths for long and very long sentences from Settings. With more than 400 sentences the line is drawn in 400 steps, each showing its longest sentence.

Most used words lists the words, or pairs or threes of words, you use most, with their count and share. Skip common words leaves out words such as the, and, of and their Hindi equivalents. Click a word to mark it in the text. More counts adds letters, digits, spaces, punctuation marks, emoji, lines, different words (and their share, which never passes 100%), the average word and sentence, the longest sentence (with a link to it), pages at 500 words a page (250 double spaced), the size as a UTF-8 file, code points, the length in JavaScript and the writing systems the text uses.

Most used letters lists the twenty letters used most, with count and share. Capital and small letters count together and a letter with its marks counts as one. Untick Letters only to count every character: spaces, new lines, digits and punctuation marks too, with characters that cannot be seen shown by their Unicode number. A very long text is counted in its first 400,000 characters.

Three buttons stand below the counts. Word cloud draws up to 40 of the most used words, the larger the more often they are used, without common words and web addresses; Save picture stores it as a PNG file. Compare two texts puts your text beside a second one that you paste or open from a file (up to 200,000 characters, not kept) and shows 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. Report gathers the counts, readability, sentence lengths, your limits, the writing checks and the ten most used words as plain text, to copy or to save as a .txt file.

7. Changing the Case

Each button on Case shows what your text will look like and changes the selected text, or all of it when nothing is selected. Everyday cases: Sentence case, lower case, UPPER CASE, Title Case, Capitalize Each Word and iNVERSE cASE (for text typed with Caps Lock on). Fun: aLtErNaTiNg and rAnDoM. For code and file names, each line is changed on its own.

• Chicago (18th edition, 2024): articles, and, but, for, or, nor, to, as and prepositions of up to four letters stay small; prepositions of five or more letters get a capital ("A Room with a View", "Much Ado About Nothing").
• APA (7th edition) and AP: every short word (articles, conjunctions, prepositions) of three letters or fewer stays small.
• MLA (9th edition): articles, every preposition, coordinating conjunctions and to stay small.
• Simple: a short list of small words stays small.

In every style the first and last words and the first word after a colon get a capital. Short forms in capitals (GST, NASA), words like iPhone, web and email addresses and the names you list keep their shape; Capital letter rules follows Turkish, Azerbaijani, Lithuanian, Dutch or Greek.

8. Find and Replace

Type in Find and the matches are marked in the text, with the count beside the box; Enter and Shift+Enter go to the next and previous match. Replace changes the current match and Replace all every match, as one step to undo. Options: Match capitals, Whole words, Pattern (a regular expression) and Keep capitals when replacing. Without Pattern the text is found exactly as typed, with its hyphens, dots and other signs, so well-known is found with Whole words too. Type \n for a new line and \t for a tab; with a pattern, $1 puts back what the first ( ) found and $<name> a named group. Replace many at once takes one change per line, written old => new or as two columns with a tab between them.

9. Clean Up and Line Tools

Clean up lists what it finds in your text, such as hidden characters, extra or unusual spaces, curly quotes, long dashes, ellipsis characters, runs of blank lines, HTML tags and tabs, with a Fix button for each and Fix all of these. The indent at the start of a line is kept, so it is not listed as extra spaces. The buttons below fix spaces, join broken lines (text copied from a PDF or an email), turn curly quotes and long dashes into plain ones, remove hidden characters or extra blank lines, make one paragraph, remove HTML tags, accents, emoji, punctuation or numbers, and turn tabs into spaces.

Lines works on whole lines, or on the selected lines: sort (A to Z, Z to A, by length, shuffled, or by number, where file-2 comes before file-10), remove repeats (or keep only the repeated or the single lines, or count them), remove empty lines, number lines (or, with Remove numbers, take a number or list mark such as 1. 2) (3) - or * off the start of each line), add text before or after each line (# can become the line number), join, split at commas, spaces, tabs, sentences or your own text, keep or remove lines with a word or pattern, wrap long lines (and, if you choose, cut words longer than a line; an indent as wide as the line itself is not kept), reverse lines, words or letters, and trim spaces. Each tool uses the options you choose for it and remembers them. Before you press the button, the note beside it says how many lines would change.

10. Convert

Choose a format and type on either side: the other side changes as you type, and Swap reads the text on the left as a code (when it is not one, both sides stay as they are and a note says why). Formats: binary, hex, decimal and octal (each number a byte of UTF-8 or a whole character), Base64 (also for web addresses, and in lines of 76), URL codes, HTML codes, Unicode codes in seven styles, Morse, the NATO alphabet (with the pilots' Tree, Fife and Niner), Braille (grade 1, English, with the number, capital and letter signs), ROT13 (and ROT5 for digits), Caesar (with every shift and a guess at the right one for English), Atbash, Vigenere, ROT47 and A1Z26. Paste a code into the text box and TextForge says what it looks like, with a button to read it. Numbers written as whole characters with nothing between them cannot be read back, and a note says so; with a space between them, or as bytes, they can.

Morse plays as sound at 5 to 40 words a minute, with Farnsworth gaps, four tones and an optional flashing light, and Save sound makes a .wav file; both are made for up to 10 minutes of Morse. Hidden message writes a secret with invisible characters inside a visible text and reads one back; it is hidden, not locked, so never use it for anything private.

11. Fancy Text and the Post Editor

Styles shows your text in 58 styles from the Unicode set (bold, italic, script, gothic, outline, typewriter, bubbles, squares, lines through or under letters, upside down, mirror, glitch and frames); click a style to copy it, and star it to keep it at the top. Partly marks a style that has no form for some letters. The post editor puts bold, italic, underline and other styles on just the words you select, for sites without a bold button, and shows the room left on LinkedIn, X and Instagram. Make plain turns fancy letters back into ordinary ones; real accents and Indian scripts stay as they are. Screen readers may read fancy letters one by one or skip them, so use them for a name or a heading.

12. Make Text

• Placeholder: Lorem ipsum, English-like words or Hindi words, in paragraphs, sentences or words, optionally in <p> tags.
• Password: passwords of 4 to 128 characters, passphrases of 3 to 12 words and PINs, made with your browser's secure random numbers. The strength shows the bits and how long guessing would take on average at 10 billion guesses a second.
• Random: IDs (UUID version 4, or version 7, which starts with the time), numbers in a range, with or without repeats, and sample names from India or around the world.
• Invisible: blank characters, such as the zero-width space and the no-break space, each with what it does. Copy one, or type a number to get a button that copies that many at once.
• Repeat: a text repeated up to 100,000 times (20 million characters at most) with your choice of separator. The box shows the first 500,000 characters of a longer result; Copy, Save and Add to your text take all of it.

Add to your text puts the result at the end of the text box.

13. Saved Data, Settings and Limits

TextForge keeps your text, the text in its other boxes and your choices in this browser, so they are there after a reload. Nothing is kept until you type or change something. A box keeps up to 200,000 characters and all of them together up to 1,000,000, because every tool on this site shares the browser's storage; a longer text stays on screen until you close the page, and TextForge says so. It also says so when the browser's storage for this site is full. Settings chooses the letters and size of the text box, spelling marks, whether your text is kept, the reading and speaking speeds and the lengths for long and very long sentences.

TextTransform and TextAnalyzer Pro became part of TextForge on 15 November 2026. When this browser still holds text you left in either of them (their text boxes, and up to 50 saved analyses of TextAnalyzer Pro), Settings shows a part named From TextTransform and TextAnalyzer Pro with two buttons: one saves those texts as one .txt file, the other removes them from this browser after asking. TextForge does not read them until you open Settings and never changes them by itself.

14. Keyboard and Accessibility

Every button, box and tab can be reached with Tab; option groups (such as the formats of Convert) also move with the arrow keys. In the text box, and straight after a tool's button was pressed, Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y undo and redo, and Ctrl+S saves the text. In the windows that ask for a goal or a limit, Enter confirms and Escape cancels. In Find, Enter and Shift+Enter move between matches; in Replace with, Enter replaces one and Ctrl+Enter replaces all. While you are using the tool and not typing, ? opens the help window. The keys work after a click or tap in the tool, so they never get in the way of the rest of the page. Ctrl+F, Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U are left to your browser.

15. How It Was Checked

The counting and conversion code was checked on 1,505,386 cases in 11 groups. On random texts it gives exactly the results of the original TextForge, apart from the changes described here, which were made so that long texts no longer freeze the page (two hundred thousand dots, spaces or tags used to take minutes). The limits were worked out again from each site's published rules, the SMS alphabet was read from the 3GPP standard itself, the title case examples follow the style guides, and the readability scores were worked out again from their published formulas. The page was checked in a browser on phones and computers in both themes.

On 14 November 2026 the whole tool was tested again: every button and option in a real browser, and the counting and conversion code against values worked out from the published rules. 40 faults were found and fixed. Among them: once there was text in the box, the line tools ran with their first settings whatever was chosen; wrapping with cut words could freeze the page; a plain search for a word with a hyphen was refused with Whole words; and hex code of Russian or Telugu text written without spaces did not read back. The same checks were run on the code before and after the fixes, and the old code was run against the new on generated texts, where every difference is one that was meant.

On 15 November 2026 TextTransform and TextAnalyzer Pro became part of TextForge, which got the parts only they had. Those parts were checked in a real browser on computers and phones in both themes, and the tests of 14 November were run again on the whole tool.

16. Troubleshooting and Support

• Paste did nothing: the browser did not allow reading the clipboard. Click in the box and press Ctrl+V.
• A file did not open: TextForge says why, for example a PDF, an old .doc file or a file over 25 MB.
• The marks are gone: for text longer than 600,000 characters the marks in the text box are switched off, and the status line says so.
• My text was not kept: it was longer than 200,000 characters, or Keep my text is off in Settings, or the browser blocks storage for this site, or its storage for this site is full (TextForge says so).

For anything else, use the contact form. The FAQ answers the common questions.