About TextLab

Everything here starts from text you wrote or text somebody sent you — an essay, a chapter, a product description, a list of names, a transcript. Not data. That distinction decides what gets built: you will find a syllable counter for scanning a poem and a title case converter that knows AP style disagrees with Chicago, but nothing that expects you to know what a regular expression is.

No tool here asks for an account, an email address or a card. Nothing is metered, nothing is watermarked, and there is no paid tier holding the useful half of a feature hostage. The site is paid for by the advertising slots you can see, which is the whole of the arrangement.

Every one of them runs inside your browser. Opening a page downloads a small program; from that moment your text is counted, recased, sorted or translated on your own machine, and no part of it is sent to us. There is no queue, no upload progress bar and no size limit imposed by a server, because there is no server involved in the work — a 100,000-word manuscript is handled by the same code as a one-line caption.

Two consequences follow. Results appear as fast as you can type, since nothing is waiting on a network round trip; and once a page has loaded it keeps working with the connection off, which is genuinely useful on a train. The trade is that JavaScript has to be switched on: the words around each tool are plain HTML and readable without it, but the tool itself will not run.

Where a tool produces text you can use, it has a Copy button. Where a result is worth keeping as a file, Download sits next to Copy rather than instead of it. And you can paste anywhere on a page — the box does not need focus first.

Because the second tool is usually needed within a minute of the first. Somebody counting the words in a pasted article almost immediately wants the line breaks taken out of it; somebody cleaning a list wants it sorted and de-duplicated straight afterwards. Splitting those across separate sites would mean a search, a new tab and a re-paste for every step. Here the next tool is a link away and the text behaves the same way in all of them.

The catalogue is grouped by what a tool does to your text rather than by what the result is called, which is how people actually look for these things:

• Counting — 12 tools
• Notation converters — 7 tools
• Generators — 4 tools
• Letter case — 6 tools
• Lists & order — 6 tools
• Clean up — 7 tools
• Readability — 4 tools
• Find & extract — 4 tools
• Slugs — 2 tools

A few obvious text jobs are missing on purpose. Comparing two drafts line by line, generating lorem ipsum, and formatting JSON, XML or SQL are work on code and data rather than on prose; pulling the readable words out of a saved web page is a parsing job. Each wants an interface these tools are not shaped for, and a worse second copy of it would help nobody.

Also absent: anything that decorates text for a social feed — bubble letters, upside down type, invisible characters. They are a different craft with a different audience, and mixing them in would make this a novelty site rather than a working one.

It is not uploaded, not logged and not stored. Your text exists in the tab while the tab is open and disappears when you close it or clear the box; nothing is written to your device, so nothing survives to the next visit. An unpublished chapter, a client brief or a list of names is as safe here as it is in a local text editor.

That statement covers what TextLab does. It says nothing about what a browser extension, an employer's proxy or the machine itself might see — only that this site adds nothing to that list.