markdown-reading-time 🧮

A library to help you calculate text/markdown files reading time. The strategy to calculate this estimated time is based on the Medium post "Read Time and You", which introduces at a high level the algorithm used by medium for this task. As a summary:

• The reading time is based on the average reading speed of an adult (roughly 275 WPM).
• The algorithm take the total word count of a post and translate it into minutes.
• For images, the algorithm count 12 seconds for the first image, 11 for the second, and minus an additional second for each subsequent image.
• Any images after the tenth image are counted at three seconds.

Installation

$ npm install -g readme-example

Usage

Simply import the package and pass the text content you want to measure as a string:

import fs from 'fs';
import markdownReadingTime from 'markdown-reading-time';

const content = fs.readfileSynf('./README.md');

const readingStats = markdownReadingTime(content);
// => { imagesCount: 0, imagesTime: 0, minutes: 1, time: 33818, wordsCount: 155 }

Configuration

WPS Factor

By default the WPS (Words Per Second) factor is setted to 275, as recommended in the previously mentioned post, but you can change this value for the reading tima calculation:

const readingStats = markdownReadingTime(content, { wordsPerMinute: 200 });

Disable image calculation

Image reading time is calculation is enabled by default however if you wanted to disable this feature you can do it as follows:

const readingStats = markdownReadingTime(content, { includeImages: false });

Support

You can open an issue through GitHub or contact me directly by e-mail: [email protected].

License

Released under the MIT license.