LinkedIn post preview: the fold, before you post.

In the feed LinkedIn shows the opening of a post and hides the rest behind see more. LinkedIn does not publish where the cut falls, and it moves with the width of the reader's screen and their font size. The card draws the fold the way Sonar's own drafting surfaces draw it: after about 210 characters or 3 line breaks, whichever comes first, snapped back to the last whole word. That model is one estimate and does not change when you switch the card to phone width; the toggle narrows the card so you can see how your lines wrap on a phone, where a long first line becomes three and a paragraph becomes a wall. An estimate, and a useful one, because the mistakes it catches are the same on every screen: a first line that runs long, a point buried in paragraph three, a post that is all set-up above the cut.

The counter under the card says how many letters show before the fold. The character count is against LinkedIn's 3,000-character limit for a post, and a formatted letter counts as two, the safe side of that limit.

For most of the people who scroll past, the first line and the one after it are the whole post. Two tests. Does the first line stand alone, with a subject, a verb and a reason to keep reading, and does it fit a phone width without wrapping into a paragraph? Eight to twelve words does it. And does the second line change something, add the number, name the tension, turn the first line over, rather than restating it? "We raised our prices this week, for the first time in two years" passes the first test; the client's line about six months passes the second.

The counter flags a first line that runs past the fold with no break, because a reader then meets a wall before they meet a point. It also counts paragraphs and flags one past 300 characters, which reads as a wall on a phone even below the fold.

The card counts a hashtag as # followed by letters or numbers, and a mention as @ followed by a name. In the real composer a mention is made by typing @ and picking the person from the list, and that person is notified, so count them as what they are: a tap on someone's shoulder. One or two mentions of people who were part of the story read as generous; a row of them reads as a request. Hashtags belong at the end, if anywhere, and the counter says so past five.

This is the card Sonar drafts into. Every draft in Compose and on the board renders in it, fold and count included, and the post drawer's card also shows the attached image, the pages of a PDF carousel or the video, so a post is checked whole before it is scheduled. How Sonar drafts the post for you.