Selective Word Count

[jackdeland]

The Boss wants to know whether we can do a selective word count by excluding some topics. Specifically, count all the words in the project except for those in the cover and copyright topics. I've tried conditioning them out, but Flare seems to count all words regardless of condition in the Statistics report. Anyone have a tip for this?

[Nita Beck]

This might be too much trouble, but generate a Word doc that excludes the topics you don't want to count. Then use Word's word-count feature.

[jackdeland]

Hi, Nita - Actually, it's not a bad idea if we only need to do it once. The copyright will stay the same, and the covers won't vary much, so I could just do the count in Flare and subtract the Word word count. So to speak. But it would be nice to have a more foolproof way.

[wclass]

What's the objective of a word count?

Flare's statistics counter only counts snippets once, but if you generate into Word then any snippet content will be counted each time it is used. Similar for headers and footers!
If you want to know figures for translation, then you'd need to go with Flare's count. If you want to estimate size of final output, I'd go with something Word could calculate for me.

[Nita Beck]

<headslap>Doh! You're absolutely right re the snippets. I was done in again by an insufficient quantity of caffeine!</headslap>

[jackdeland]

Actually, I meant that I would do the count in Word only for the covers and the (static) copyright page, and rely on Flare for the project total for each project. Good point about the snippets; it would be for translation. I'll explain the situation to The Boss.

[pdenchfield]

Word output is getting a build log error: 10086 related to missing key in dictionary.
What alternatives do I have to count the words per output of a Flare project? (rather than counting words in all files)

[ChoccieMuffin]

Could you make a copy of your project, delete all the content from the topics you don't want to include, or delete the entire topics, and THEN do a wordcount?

[pdenchfield]

Thanks for the idea, ChoccieMuffin. Could work for just one project. Kind of a headache if we had to do it for all of them!