Text & writing: free online tools

5 free tools, processed locally in your browser.

Five tools that come into play at different moments of writing. The word counter measures while you draft, the spell checker reads back over what you wrote, the case converter puts headings into shape, the comparison tool shows what changed between two versions, and the Lorem Ipsum generator fills a mock-up before the real copy exists.

Only one of them talks to the outside world. The spell checker queries the LanguageTool service first, which assumes a connection and means the text you submit passes through that service; if the call fails, or you are offline, it falls back to a more limited local pass, and the banner above the result names which of the two engines answered. The other four compute everything inside the page.

Tools in the Text & writing category

Measure before you correct

The word counter refreshes six figures on every keystroke: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time. The two character counts are not redundant. A meta description or a social media bio is measured in characters including spaces; an essay or an article is steered by word count. Reading time assumes a pace of two hundred words per minute and switches to seconds below one minute.

A sentence is recognised by its closing punctuation, a paragraph by the blank line separating it from the next one. Text pasted out of a PDF, where every line ends with a hard return, therefore inflates the paragraph count artificially: join the lines back together before trusting that figure.

A word, for this counter, is a run of letters, digits, apostrophes and hyphens: don’t counts as one word, and so does a hyphenated compound such as long-standing. Reading time is always rounded up, which is why a thirty-word note shows nine seconds rather than nothing at all.

Correct, then check what moved

The checker takes about nineteen thousand characters per pass, beyond which the text has to be cut up. When LanguageTool answers, the correction covers grammar and agreement, and every change is listed with its category. The local fallback is a different animal: a dictionary of frequent French misspellings, plus typographic rules — double spaces removed, the space before a colon, a semicolon, a question mark and a closing quotation mark, ellipses normalised, a capital restored at the start of a sentence. Both paths are set to French, so a draft written in another language will come back with suggestions you cannot use.

Compare two texts makes most sense immediately afterwards. Paste the original version on the left and the corrected one on the right, and the added or deleted lines appear highlighted. The comparison proceeds line by line by longest common subsequence: a sentence rewritten from scratch shows up as a deletion followed by an insertion, not as a word-level edit. Past roughly two thousand lines on either side, the tool declines the calculation and says so.

Case and French conventions

The case converter offers seven transformations. Sentence case capitalises only the first letter after each piece of strong punctuation. Title Case capitalises every word except the common articles and prepositions sitting inside the title. The conversions respect French: accents are kept on capital letters, as typographic usage requires and contrary to what many editors produce.

Two modes target code rather than prose. snake_case and camelCase first strip accents and every non-alphanumeric character: they exist to build a file name, a key or an identifier out of a heading, not to reformat a sentence.

Filling a mock-up properly

The Lorem Ipsum generator draws its words from a fixed Latin vocabulary and a pseudo-random generator seeded on the clock: two clicks give two different texts. Choose the unit according to what you are testing. Paragraphs to judge a page template, sentences for a standfirst or a teaser, words when a box imposes an exact count. The quantity runs from one to nine hundred and ninety-nine.

The option that opens with the classic formula stays useful, since it flags the block as dummy copy at a glance. Turn it off when you want to test how a layout really reads without the reader recognising fake Latin in the first three words.

Categories