Limit characters in paragraph text field

There's no setting in GF right now to limit the amount of characters in the textearea/paragraph field. We may add that functionality in the future, but I'm not sure when right now. As an alternative, there are a few simple jQuery solutions out there that would do what you're looking for. I found this one in a quick search.

http://www.unwrongest.com/projects/limit/

I found several others so there are plenty of choices out there.

I'm not 100% sure about that particular script having not tested it. You would just need to follow the implementation steps on their site.

If you want something quick and easy, you can try this. I've used it before and it works well. It doesn't write out the number of characters left, but it does limit the characters in the textarea.

copy this, save it as limit-textarea.js and upload it to your theme where other scripts are located (usually a js or javascript folder in the main theme directory).

/***********************************************
* Textarea Maxlength script- © Dynamic Drive (www.dynamicdrive.com)
* This notice must stay intact for legal use.
* Visit http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ for full source code
***********************************************/

function ismaxlength(obj){
var mlength=obj.getAttribute? parseInt(obj.getAttribute("maxlength")) : ""
if (obj.getAttribute && obj.value.length>mlength)
obj.value=obj.value.substring(0,mlength)
}

or you can right click and save the file if you prefer.

once you've uploaded the file to your theme, you'll want to open the header.php file, and include this script right before the </head> tag.

<script src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/js/limit-textarea.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
 		jQuery("#input_X_XX").attr("maxlength", "50");
 		jQuery("#input_X_XX").attr("onkeyup", "return ismaxlength(this)");
	});
</script>

You'll need to replace the 2 instances of the input id in the example "input_X_XX' with the actual id of your textarea (view source to find that), set the maxlength (max number of characters) to your preference and you should be set.

Note: I grabbed the script from this site and since you can't access the markup directly in the form, used a little jQuery to append the new attributes.

Glad it worked for you. The character limit is definitely going to make an upcoming release.. most likely version 1.4 which should be out pretty soon.