I want to make a template for the record feed that contains only the first ~50 words of the article, not the full text.

I know I can do 

{$record->truncated()|raw}

To get the entire record text, but can I get only a part of it?

Thanks.

So where exactly do you want to cut? After x characters? One paragraph? Can it cut words? …?

I recently used something like this to cut the text for meta tags. 

{{$previewtext=mb_substr(strip_tags($record->truncated()),0,255);}}
{$previewtext}