Frequently Asked Questions

Truncation is what happens when a platform cuts your post short — either hiding everything past a visual fold behind a "…see more" link, or rejecting characters beyond a hard limit. PostTruncate shows you exactly where each platform makes that cut, live, while you write, so the part that matters never disappears below the fold.

Feeds are built for scanning, so platforms collapse long posts to keep scrolling fast and fit more posts on screen. Each platform draws the line differently: LinkedIn folds at roughly 140–210 characters, Facebook at about 110–480 depending on device, Instagram at around 125, and X simply enforces a hard 280-character cap. Anything past the fold is only seen by people who actively tap "more" — which most readers never do.

PostTruncate previews LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and SMS — with live character counts, fold markers, thread splitting, and SMS segment math for each. There is also a Google SERP preview for page titles and meta descriptions, and a free embeddable counter widget for your own site.

PostTruncate counts against each platform’s published and widely-observed limits — 280 for X, 210/140 for the LinkedIn fold, 5 hashtags for Instagram, and a flat 23-character weight for links. Platforms occasionally adjust these, and rendering varies slightly by device, so treat the previews as a close estimate rather than a pixel-perfect guarantee.

Yes, completely free to use with no sign-up required and nothing to install. The tool is supported by unobtrusive ads placed in reserved spaces that never shift the layout while you’re working.

Yes. Every space, line break, and punctuation mark counts as one character, and both PostTruncate’s counter and the platform limits include them. The only common exception is links on X/Twitter, which collapse to a flat 23 characters regardless of how many letters, symbols, or slashes the real URL contains.

PostTruncate counts by Unicode code points, so a simple emoji like 🙂 registers as one character. Many emoji are built from several joined code points — skin-tone variations, flags, and combined glyphs such as 👨‍👩‍👧 — and those register as two or more. The tool handles any script correctly, including CJK characters. Most platforms, X especially, also weight emoji more heavily than plain letters, so an emoji-heavy draft uses up a little more of your limit than the visible glyph count suggests.

Character count is the total of every individual character — letters, spaces, punctuation, and emoji all included — and it is what platform limits are actually measured against. Word count is the number of whitespace-separated words, no matter how long each one is. PostTruncate shows both side by side, updating live as you type. A full 280-character tweet might be only 40 words, so watch the character count to stay under a limit and use word count as a readability gauge.

X automatically wraps every URL with its t.co shortener, which always occupies 23 characters regardless of how long or short the original link is. So a 5-character link and a 200-character link both cost you exactly 23 toward the 280 limit. PostTruncate reflects this in its counter, so the number you see matches what X will actually report.

Those bold, italic, or script-style letters you paste from font generators aren’t real formatting — they’re pseudo-Unicode characters from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block. They look styled but screen readers either spell them out letter by letter or skip them, which hurts both accessibility and your organic reach. PostTruncate tallies them so you can see exactly how many characters they add, and the monitor flags them so you can swap back to plain text.

It strips invisible and zero-width characters — zero-width spaces, byte-order marks, bidirectional control marks, soft hyphens, and stray control codes. These often sneak in when you copy from other apps, and they silently break character counts and screen reader behavior without ever being visible. Sanitizing reveals the real, visible character total.

The Emoji Stripper removes all emoji and graphical Unicode symbols from your text — useful when repurposing a social post into a clean email or document. The Hashtag Extractor pulls all # tags out of the body copy and groups them at the end of the text, giving you a cleaner caption layout.

Keyword density refers to the percentage of times a specific word appears in your text relative to your total word count. While maintaining a focused topic is essential for SEO copywriters, repeating the same keyword too many times triggers automated search engine filters for "keyword stuffing." Our dynamic Keyword Overuse Monitor tracks word frequency in real-time. If any unique word or phrase crosses a safe 3.0% density threshold, the platform automatically flags that specific row in alert orange, allowing you to instantly swap in synonyms and protect your content from algorithmic search penalties before you publish.

The reading timer divides your word count by 275 words per minute — a standard silent reading speed — which is useful for judging how long an article or newsletter will take to read. The speaking timer uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable conversational pace, which helps scriptwriters and video creators check timing for short-form content.

No. The entire editor and every preview run locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded. Your text never leaves your device: there’s no account, no upload, and no server processing of your content.

No. The auto-save runs entirely in your browser using sessionStorage — a temporary, tab-scoped cache built into every browser. When you refresh the page in the same tab, the tool restores your draft from that local cache. When you close the tab, the draft is cleared. Nothing is sent to any server.

This happens because of a change in your text's encoding. Standard SMS uses GSM 7-bit encoding, which fits up to 160 characters in a single message. The moment your text includes a non-GSM character — an emoji, a regional script, or certain symbols — the entire message switches to Unicode, which holds only 70 characters per segment. If a Unicode message exceeds 70 characters, a multi-part header is added and the usable space per segment drops to 67 characters. PostTruncate shows your current encoding and segment count live, so you always know where the break happens.

Not always. Standard letters and numbers each count as one character. Symbols from the GSM extended table — including the Euro sign (€), square brackets, curly braces, and the pipe character | — count as two characters each, even though they keep the message in GSM 7-bit mode. Emoji are different: adding one forces the entire message into Unicode, which reduces the per-segment limit from 160 characters down to 70.