Measure the manuscript before it becomes a book.
Count words and reading time, estimate how many pages a draft will fill and how thick the spine will be, tidy the typography, and look up paper sizes and folded formats — all on this page, in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere.
Words & reading time
Paste a draft. Counts update as you type. Reading speed is adjustable — 200–250 words a minute is typical for silent reading, 130–160 for reading aloud.
Book length & spine width
An estimate of how many pages a word count becomes at a given trim size and type size, rounded up to whole signatures, with the spine thickness that follows from the paper. Treat it as a planning figure; the final count depends on the typeface, hyphenation and chapter openings.
Margins assumed: 19 mm sides, 22 mm head and foot. Average word taken as 5.7 characters including the space; 15 % of each page left to ragged lines and paragraph ends.
- Words per page
- —
- Body pages
- —
- Signatures
- —
- Leaves
- —
- Spine width
- —
- Text block weight
- —
A novel of 300 pages on cream paper sits near 18 mm.
Typographic clean-up
Turn typewriter habits into typeset text: straight quotes to curly, double hyphens to dashes, three dots to an ellipsis, and the stray spaces that creep in while drafting. Nothing is changed inside your text except what you tick.
Paper & format reference
The numbers people keep looking up. ISO sizes halve along the long edge and keep a 1 : √2 ratio; folded formats take their names from how many times a sheet is folded.
Sheet sizes
| Name | mm | inches |
|---|---|---|
| A3 | 297 × 420 | 11.69 × 16.54 |
| A4 | 210 × 297 | 8.27 × 11.69 |
| A5 | 148 × 210 | 5.83 × 8.27 |
| A6 | 105 × 148 | 4.13 × 5.83 |
| B5 | 176 × 250 | 6.93 × 9.84 |
| US Letter | 216 × 279 | 8.5 × 11 |
| US Legal | 216 × 356 | 8.5 × 14 |
| Tabloid | 279 × 432 | 11 × 17 |
| Royal (UK trade) | 156 × 234 | 6.14 × 9.21 |
| Demy (UK trade) | 138 × 216 | 5.43 × 8.5 |
| B-format paperback | 129 × 198 | 5.08 × 7.8 |
| A-format paperback | 111 × 178 | 4.37 × 7.01 |
Folded formats
| Format | Folds | Leaves | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Folio (2°) | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Quarto (4°) | 2 | 4 | 8 |
| Sexto (6°) | — | 6 | 12 |
| Octavo (8°) | 3 | 8 | 16 |
| Duodecimo (12°) | — | 12 | 24 |
| Sextodecimo (16°) | 4 | 16 | 32 |
Units
| 1 point | 1⁄72 in = 0.3528 mm |
| 1 pica | 12 pt = 4.233 mm |
| 1 inch | 25.4 mm = 72 pt |
| Leaf | one sheet of the finished book — two pages |
| Caliper | thickness of one leaf, usually 0.08–0.15 mm |
Paper weight
North American “text” weight is the weight of 500 sheets at 25 × 38 in; grams per square metre is the same paper measured the metric way.