Online Tool Store
Text Column Width Formatter
Wrap and lay out plain text into fixed-width, newspaper-style columns with a configurable column count, width, and gutter, ready to copy or download.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to a server.
How the Text Column Width Formatter works
- Paste a block of text, then choose how many columns, how wide each column should be, and how much gutter space to leave between them.
- The text is word-wrapped to the target width, producing a list of lines.
- Those lines are split evenly across the chosen number of columns and rendered side by side, monospace-aligned.
Why fixed-width columns
Fixed-width, newspaper-style columns are still useful for plain-text documents, README files, terminal output, and any format where you can't rely on CSS or a page-layout engine to do the wrapping for you.
FAQ
How does the wrapping algorithm work?
It greedily fills each line up to the column width by adding one word at a time, breaking to a new line whenever the next word would overflow. A single word longer than the column width is truncated rather than hyphenated.
How are rows split across columns?
The wrapped lines are split evenly by count: if there are 30 wrapped lines and 2 columns, the first 15 go in column one and the next 15 in column two, laid out side by side like a printed newspaper page.
Can I use this for a monospace print layout?
Yes — the output uses plain spaces for padding and gutters, so it stays aligned in any monospace font, which is exactly what you want for a text file, code comment block, or terminal-rendered document.
How we compare
| Feature | Online Tool Store | Word processor columns | Unix `column`/`pr` |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain-text output, no formatting lock-in | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| No terminal required | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Great for quick text-file layouts; for real print typesetting with hyphenation and justified margins, use a dedicated layout tool.