Most of us spend a lot of time customizing our blog’s theme for making it look stylish and catchy. We add attractive images and effects to our design but how many of us think about the readability of the content? Readability means the way the text flows on the screen, line spacing, comfortable font size etc. Large improvements to the readability are possible only by lot of alterations of your CSS file. If you are not a tech guy then this can be a hard nut for you. Instead of changing your theme, consider doing something with your current design’s typography instead with the help of these plugins.
1. WP- Typography
If you are looking for an easy way to improve the typography of your WordPress blog then this plugin should be your first choice. WP-Typography plugin comes with an awesome set of features including spacing control, hyphenation and intelligent character replacement including smart handling of quotation marks, dashes, trademarks, ellipses, math symbols, ordinal suffixes and fractions. Another notable feature is CSS Hooks for styling ampersands, uppercase words, numbers, and initial quotes. WP-Typography plugin requires certain requirements to run. This includes the host server with PHP 5 or later and the text must be encoded in UTF – 8.
2. Drop Caps
What is a drop cap? In desktop publishing, the first letter of a paragraph that is enlarged to “drop” down two or more lines, as in the next paragraph. Drop caps are often seen at the beginning of novels, where the top of the first letter of the first word lines up with the top of the first sentence and drops down to the four or fifth sentence. Drop caps are a nice little plugin which adds a cute drop cap to your posts, pages and comments. The updated version of Drop Caps comes with many settings including a default style sheet. Drop caps shows that you are at the start of something and is very handy when your site is text heavy. To see Drop Caps in action check the first letter of this post.
3. Simple Pull Quote
Simple Pull Quote is WordPress plugin that let you insert pull quotes in to your blog posts to emphasize certain sentences or phrases. When installed Simple Pull Quote will add “Pullquote” button to both HTML and TinyMCE editors. [pullquote]This is an example of pull quote[/pullquote] All you have to do is to select the sentences for quoting and then click the “Pullquote” button. Pull Quotes can be customized by editing the included CSS file. Pull quotes are an easy way to breakup text heavy posts. They will help to breakout heavy text posts and highlight important quotes and pieces of information.
4. WP –Syntax
Do you run a programming blog which deals with lot of code snippets? Then WP-Syntax is plugin which can be useful to you. WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting for embedding source code within pages or posts. It supports almost all popular programming languages including PHP, Python, Java, C, C++ etc. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.
It avoids conflicts with other 3rd party plugins by running an early pre-filter and a late post-filter that substitutes and pulls the code snippets out first and then pushes them back in with highlighting at the end. The result is source code formatted and highlighted the way you intended.
5. Font Resizer
Font Resizer is a plugin which improves the usability and readability of your blog. This plugin allows you to give the visitors of your site the option to change the font size. The plugin acts over jQuery and saves the settings in a cookie. So the visitor see the same font size if they revisit your site. Which contents are going resized, the resize steps and other options you can set on the admin page called “font-resizer”.
These are some useful plugin which brings up notable changes to the readability of your blog. Have you ever think about the readability of your blog? Share your opinions.
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