matteotrap

<p>WordPress Excerpts should be short, you know.</p>
<p>But when a user writes a lot, you might want to limit the number of characters for the excerpt panel: that’s where the Excerpt Character Limiter plugin comes handy!</p>
<p>It will basically add a character countdown to the panel titlebar, and it will truncate the text when available characters drop to zero.<br />
Simple but effective!</p>


Excerpt character limiter

It will basically add a character countdown to the panel titlebar, and it will truncate the text when available characters drop to zero.

BettyJJ

<h4>Main features of the plugin:</h4>
<ol>
<li>It supports multi-byte language (such as Chinese). It will not produce gibberish as some other excerpt plugins do.</li>
<li>The html tags in the original posts, i.e., the font styles, colors, hyperlinks, pictures and such are preserved in the excerpt.</li>
<li>For better readability, it displays 300 characters for each post on the homepage and 150 characters for each post on archive pages.</li>
</ol>


WP-UTF8-Excerpt

This plugin generates a better excerpt for multi-byte language users (Chinese, for example). Besides, it keeps the html tags in the excerpt.

Excerpt character limiter vs WP-UTF8-Excerpt