Measure - Measure typographic line lengths right from the page

Measure is a Chrome extension measuring typographic line lengths right from the page. The "measure" being the width of a body of type, its length of course impacts how readable the text is. Generally speaking, a good measure is between 45–80 characters per line. This little tool helps you find it with a simple click in the toolbar and highlight of a line of text. Measure will display the character count of your selected line in a little tooltip. And that’s it. Simple, but really helpful. Previously I’ve seen people copy lines of text out into a word counting website or external app, or in worst cases, clicking at the start of a line and counting frantically while holding shift and pressing the right cursor key. Designing legible content requires a lot of attention, across the huge range of device types and screen sizes. A good measure on a desktop monitor might be 80 characters, but on smaller screens or multiple columns might be 45 characters. This could all go out the window depending on the colours or typeface used too, of course. So it’s definitely been designed with the user’s discretion in mind. Measure can make it easy to be more precise when creating for the web! Next up for this would be internationalising it and putting in the ability to average the measure over multiple selected lines. Let me know what you think. It'd be great to get some feedback 😁

Yes! I always copy and text paste into some tool I've just Googled!

OH, ROWAN. Killer tool my man. So very useful. I wonder — if the core function is to measure individual lines of copy, would there be a way to allow one click line selection (rather than highlighting from the first to the last character)?

I would look to make your Chrome Extension a mini platform like PopClip. There is so much more that you can do beyond typographic line lengths.