I like the stretched look in my posts but my stretches are long and uneven; can I shorten them instead of removing them completely?

Why stretches end up uneven

When you stretch words by hand, you press the tatweel key a different number of times in each word: three here, five there, once in a third word. Copy phrases from old posts or different designs and several styles end up in one text. The result is a post where some words look pulled tighter than others for no reason.

What shorten mode does exactly

It walks through the text, and whenever a tatweel is followed by one or more further tatweels, it keeps one and deletes the rest. Nothing else is touched: letters, diacritics, digits, symbols and spaces stay as they were.

A real three-word example: «عروض» with three tatweels after the ain, «الصيف» with three after the sad, and «مرحبا» with one after the mim. Seven in total.

• Shorten runs: 4 characters removed in 2 words. One tatweel is left after the ain, one after the sad, and «مرحبا» is unchanged because it had only one to begin with.
• Remove every tatweel: all seven removed in 3 words, leaving «عروض الصيف مرحبا» with no stretch at all.

A messier example: four words with runs of five, two, one and eight tatweels, 16 in total. Shortening removed 12 and kept 4, one in each word. The longest run had been eight characters, and now it matches the rest.

Steps

1. Paste the post text into the Arabic tatweel remover.
2. Choose «Shorten runs to a single tatweel» under «What to do».
3. Check the counters: «Tatweel found», «Tatweel removed» and «Words affected».
4. Copy the result and paste it into your post.

What if I want the stretch a little longer?

The mode shortens to one character only; there is no setting for two or three. If you want a longer, even stretch, shorten to one first, then add what you like by hand in the words that matter. Starting from an even text is much easier than trimming every word separately.

A reminder before posting

Stretching is visual decoration, and it has a cost: every tatweel is an extra character in the text. A stretched word does not match the plain word in search, and it can differ from it in a hashtag. Keep the stretch in text meant only to be read, like the post body, and remove it completely from hashtags, product names in your store and anything people search.