Lexicon: counting characters
A character count measures text by the number of characters in it, letters, spaces and punctuation. It is the unit most text boxes count in, and the one vendors most often use when they state a limit. From 4 source pages, read 2026-09-25; no maker pays to be listed.
It is less simple than it looks. The Unicode consortium's own FAQ describes four ways of counting characters in a string, and what a reader sees as one character can be more than one code point. For English prose the difference is small; for accented or non-Latin text it can matter.
A character limit also weighs languages differently: the same story takes far fewer characters in Chinese than in English.
1From the standard
Computing the length or position of a "character" in a Unicode string can be a little complicated, as there are four different approaches to doing so
Unicode, characters and combining marks FAQ
The better word for what end-users think of as characters is grapheme
Unicode, characters and combining marks FAQ
2On the vendors' pages
| Tool | What the vendor says | Checkpoint |
|---|---|---|
| MagicLight | Scripts up to 12,000 characters | Length |
| Mootion | 50,000 characters for Idea-to-Video on the Pro plan; lower plans list no figure | Length |
| SceneMixer | About 300,000 characters of English per project; longer books are split into volumes | Length |
Inclusion rule. Tools on the register whose recorded wording uses the term or a plain equivalent; one line per tool. Order. Alphabetical by tool name.
Enter a script up to 12,000 characters across 9 story AI models to create 50-minutes worth content.
MagicLight, AI Drama Generator page
50,000 characters (Idea-to-Video)
Mootion, pricing
- Length, longer dramatic videosScripts up to 12,000 characters
- Length, Pro plan50,000 characters for Idea-to-Video on the Pro plan; lower plans list no figure
- Length, FAQ: how long can the novel beAbout 300,000 characters of English per project; longer books are split into volumes
- Counting length, how characters are countedCounting characters in a Unicode string has four different approaches
- Counting length, programmer and end userWhat an end user calls a character is a grapheme, which can differ from a code point