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.
Simple Pull Quote.. really cool… because this quote give the something special attraction to the reader to read this message…
Yes, really cute plugin. The first time I saw it I got attracted and added it to my site.
Hey Rojish,
Thanks for these plugins but I’d like to know where to download your own “Quote” plugin which you have shared few year ago.
Thanks for your time
It looks like a good plugin, I hope it’ll increase the speed of my working process.
Thanks for your comment Vlad.
“Simple Pull Quote” really impressed ,
Yes, really a cute plugin 🙂
I agree with Shyam! Simple Pull quote is really good and let me be frank! I didn’t know about any of these plugins! Thanks Rojish
Hello Lalit, welcome to my blog!
Thanks for stopping by and dropping a comment 🙂
I was searching for WP-syntax. Friend, you have really saved my time. Great work. Bookmarked!!!
Hello Rajesh, welcome to my blog.
Thanks for stopping by and dropping a comment 🙂
Hi Rojish, nice list and I think ‘Simple Pull Quote’ is quite useful plugin for me. Thanks for sharing.
Hello JK, welcome to my blog and thanks for your comment 🙂
Great article i just use some plugins from this list and its really good for any wordpress
Thanks for your comment Sandeep.
simple pull quote & drop caps look very interesting.. never thought about readability of my blog
Thanks for your comments Sandeep 🙂
Nice list. I think a lot of people often forget about the huge importance of Typography in blogs. Making your posts “readable” as well as adding nice font’s will help make your blog stand out from the crowd. My friend Pippin created a plugin called “Font Uploader” which I would also recommend. It’s premium but it will allow you to add almost any custom font to your site.
You are right friend, most people forget about the typography, they are concerned only about design. Never heard about ‘Font Uploader’ plugin, thanks for sharing about that.
Great to see plugins which work for better readability of users !!
I liked that simple quote Plugin;)
thanks rojish for the great compilation!
Glad to know that you liked simple quote plugin.
Thanks for the comment Shashank 🙂
thank you really good research. hope that it will work for me aswell
http://www.sociablebadger.com/
Hello Martin, welcome to my blog and thanks for commenting 🙂
Rojish, thanks for share its. I Will try its in my blog. Thanks
Instead of all these plugins on my blog to improve the typography, i would rather try to change my theme or spend some more time to hack the theme. More plugins means more loading time.
Otherwise a nice list of plugins to improve instantly your blogs look and feel.
Yes, adding more plugins will always increase load time. It is better to replace them with manual coding if you know to play with programming.
But for the people who are not good and programming and designing, plugins are unavoidable.
Thanks for stopping by and dropping a comment Rakesh.