Column & Fixed-Width Text Formatter

Fixed-width columns appear in README files, terminal output, preformatted email bodies, and code comment blocks — anywhere a monospace context demands that every line land at exactly the same length. Column / Fixed-Width Text Formatter takes any pasted text and aligns each line to a precise character width, padding short lines with your chosen fill character and optionally truncating lines that overshoot the target.

Six quick-pick presets cover the widths that come up most often: 40, 60, 72, 80, 100, and 120 characters. Type any value up to 300 for custom layouts. Left, right, and centre alignment work independently on each line, and optional left and right border strings let you frame the output in a single pass rather than editing every row by hand.

Worked Example: Centre-Aligning a Passage at 60 Chars

Click Load Sample to fill the input with a prose passage and set the column to 60, alignment to left. Switch alignment to Centre and the output redistributes padding symmetrically around each line: a 30-character sentence gains 15 spaces on each side to reach 60 characters total. The stats bar above the output reads uniform width once every line is exactly 60 characters — if any line overruns (source line longer than 60), the stats bar shows the actual maximum instead, which is the signal to turn on Truncate long lines.

What Each Option Controls

• Column width: the target line length in characters, from 1 to 300. Every line in the output is padded to this width unless Truncate is off and the source line is longer.
• Alignment (Left / Centre / Right): where the content sits within the padded column. Centre uses floor-left, ceil-right rounding, so a 1-character deficit pads left rather than right.
• Fill character: the single character used for padding. Defaults to a space. Change it to · or - to make alignment visible in output that will be inspected rather than published.
• Truncate long lines: when on, any source line longer than the column width is cut at exactly the column width. When off (the default), those lines extend past the target — the output is no longer uniformly wide, which the stats label reports.
• Left / Right border: a string prepended or appended to every output line. Up to 4 characters each. Setting left border to │ and right to │ produces a box-drawing frame; setting left to // produces a comment block for pasting into code.

Edge Cases Worth Knowing

• Blank lines become fill rows. An empty line in the source becomes a full row of the fill character at the column width, typically a row of spaces, preserving paragraph spacing in the output. If you want true blank lines preserved, use a whitespace fill character (the default) and leave Truncate off.
• Maximum 300 columns. Entering a value outside 1–300 shows the message “Maximum column width is 300." and disables the output until a valid width is entered.
• Border characters count toward line length. A left border of │ (2 chars) and right border of │ (2 chars) add 4 characters to every line, so a 60-column setting with those borders produces 64-character output lines. The stats bar reports the actual rendered length.