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My current style-guide has the (ridiculous!?) criterion that titles be no more than 48 characters per line. Is it possible to govern the length of the lines of Auto-Titles by number of characters?

If it's not possible, I welcome ideas for a working solution. Thanks!

Never seen a criterion like that too! With Scrivener, I think you can set a goal of a number of characters, but nothing like that with Mellel.

A (maybe) workaround would be to work with "Find & Replace". But we are looking here about something very advanced. You may wish to contact directly the Redlers for that.

What a bizarre rule. Anyway…

Mellel can’t stop you from composing a heading that is longer than 48 characters. But if all you need is a quick way to see whether a heading or auto-title you’ve just written satisfies the requirement as it stands or instead needs to be shortened, you can write with the Statistics palette open and select your heading as soon as you’re done drafting it. Once you do this, the number in parentheses after Characters in the General part of the Statistics Palette is the current length of your selected text in characters.

At least this is how things work if you’ve still got the default options for Statistics in the General pane of Mellel Preferences, where

Include blank characters
Include break characters
Include punctuation

are all checked. If you’ve changed any of these preferences, you might need to change them back.