Simple Text Formatting Tools for Everyday Writing

Formatting tools on Margin Meter change letters and line structure. They do not correct grammar, and they do not score writing. Each transformation shows a preview. Nothing overwrites the editor until you apply it. That sequence is the whole safety model: look, then commit, then restore the previous editor text if the result is wrong.

Restore Original stores one previous version in memory—the text from immediately before the last applied transformation. It is not unlimited undo history. For anything you cannot afford to lose, copy the text or download a UTF-8 file first.

Uppercase and lowercase conversion

UPPERCASE and lowercase map letters with English locale rules. Digits and punctuation stay as they are. These two modes are the least ambiguous of the six. Use uppercase for a short label you intend to shout visually. Use lowercase to neutralize accidental caps lock before you apply a more specific style.

Before: Margin Meter counts words.
After UPPERCASE: MARGIN METER COUNTS WORDS.
After lowercase: margin meter counts words.

Apply is explicit. Selecting a mode only fills the preview. Open the text case converter if you want that preview beside a dedicated editor.

Title Case

Title Case on this site is a practical English rule, not a full style-manual implementation. Words are capitalized, while a short list of function words (a, an, the, and, but, or, nor, for, on, at, to, from, by, of, in, as) stays lowercase unless the word is first or last. The rule will still mishandle some names, hyphenated titles, and languages other than English.

Before: notes on the river at dusk
After Title Case: Notes on the River at Dusk

Do not treat this as grammar correction. If a publication requires a different title style, follow that house list after the automatic pass.

Sentence case

Sentence case lowercases the text, then capitalizes the start of the string and letters that follow a period, question mark, or exclamation mark plus space. Abbreviations confuse it. Dr. lane arrived. may become Dr. Lane arrived. or it may capitalize oddly around the first period. Read the preview.

Before: THE HILL IS QUIET. the path is not.
After sentence case: The hill is quiet. The path is not.

Capitalize Each Word and tOGGLE cASE

Capitalize Each Word lifts the first letter of each word-like run. It does not use the small-word exception from Title Case, so of becomes Of. Toggle case reverses uppercase and lowercase letters and leaves other characters alone. Toggle is useful when a paragraph was typed with caps lock on; it is a poor choice for titles.

Before: tHE box WAS empty
After toggle: The BOX was EMPTY

Trimming extra spaces

The text cleanup tool can remove leading and trailing spaces and tabs on each line without touching the words in the middle. It can also collapse consecutive ordinary spaces into one space. It does not automatically delete paragraph breaks when you collapse spaces. Blank lines are a separate checkbox.

Before (middle line padded):

oak
  maple ash
pine

After trim plus collapse:

oak
maple ash
pine

Preview Cleanup fills the before and after sheets. Apply Cleanup writes the after text into the editor. Copy Cleaned Text uses the preview result even if you have not applied it.

Removing blank lines

Remove extra blank lines reduces consecutive empty lines to a single blank separator. Meaningful paragraph breaks remain as one empty line. The tool will not flatten a document into one block unless you also remove empty lines in the line sorter. That distinction matters when you paste from email and get four blank lines between every paragraph.

Sorting lines

The line sorter splits on logical newlines. Processing order is fixed and documented:

1. Normalize line endings (CRLF and CR become LF).
2. Apply empty-line handling (keep or remove).
3. Apply duplicate removal (keep all, remove exact duplicates, or ignore case), keeping the first occurrence.
4. Apply sorting (original order, A to Z, Z to A, shortest first, longest first).

Length sorts are stable: equal-length lines keep their earlier relative order. Original order means “do not sort,” not “restore a previous apply.”

Before:

cedar
Oak
oak
ash

After A to Z with exact duplicates kept: Oak, ash, cedar, oak (case-sensitive letters sort by the locale compare used in the script; inspect the preview). After duplicates ignoring case, the second oak drops because Oak already appeared.

Removing duplicate lines

Exact mode treats Oak and oak as different. Ignoring case treats them as the same and keeps whichever line appeared first in the sequence after empty-line handling. Empty lines can be kept as duplicates of each other unless you remove empty lines first in the order above.

Counts on the page show original line count, resulting line count, and lines removed. An empty editor is zero lines, matching the margin’s line metric.

Previewing changes before applying them

Case, cleanup, and line tools all preview. That is slower than a single “fix my text” button and much safer. If two checkboxes are on in cleanup, the after sheet shows the combined rule set. If you dislike the combination, change the boxes and preview again. The original editor stays put until Apply.

Pasted text is never executed as HTML. Previews use text content in ordinary page elements or form controls. You can paste markup; you will see it as characters, not as a rendered page.

Keeping an original copy of important text

Before a large cleanup, copy the editor or use Download TXT. Optional local draft saving on the homepage is off by default; if you enable it, the draft lives in this browser only and is not a backup. Restore Original after a case apply brings back the immediately previous editor text, which is enough for a mistaken click and not enough for a long editing session.

Line endings deserve a short note. Text copied from Windows often uses CRLF. Normalize line endings converts those pairs, and lone CR, to LF so later line splits are predictable. That change can be invisible in the editor and still matters for duplicate detection, because oak\r\n and oak\n should become the same line after normalization.

Related reading: how word counts behave after cleanup (space-only cleanup should not change the word total) and finding repeated words after you have sorted a list of names.

FAQ