Readable: A Plugin for Creating Readable Paragraphs

Ever worry that your text is not optimized for readability? Then Readable is the plugin for you. It conveniently marks the 45th and 75th characters of every paragraph tag when turned on so your line breaks fall somewhere in between those two numbers, the standard for optimum readability.

The magic character count range of 45 to 75 refers to the number of characters occupying one line of text within a paragraph, before a line break and text wrap. If that number is too low or too high, the paragraph becomes much less readable.

Here’s how it works:

The content of each paragraph tag is converted into a text string right after we duplicate it as a data attribute. The text string is then counted using the .substring() function to find the 45 to 75 characters. We then pop in a span tag with a “readable” class, which is what we need to create the styles. Once the toggle is switched off, we reinsert the original HTML content back into the paragraph using the preserved HTML from the data attribute.

Sound complicated? It’s actually very simple. Just download the three files, add them to the proper location in your code and you are ready to go! (The documentation explains it all quite easily.)