How useful is Flare 10's word count feature?

[techwriterkai]

The word count in the XML Editor (bottom left corner) is a very welcome enhancement in Flare 10. But how useful is it currently, if it's just a dead number on the screen?

We need it to do a little more for us. When we communicate with translators and others who use our topics, we don't want to open up dozens of topics, write down the word count, total them up, before we can tell them: "I'll have 5,700 words for you tomorrow." Instead, it would be great to have the word count as a column in the File List. Then we can select a bunch of topics, export to Excel, total up the word count and bang!

I realize this means to write the number into the topic along with the other file tags, but in my book that'd be a price worth paying. I mean they also contain MadCap:lastBlockDepth, MadCap:lastHeight and MadCap:lastWidth, and I guess the word count isn't any less useful...

A feature request has already been submitted. This post hopes to solicit more enlightened use cases or support for the feature request.

[NorthEast]

As a workaround, create a Word target with its own TOC, add topics to the TOC, build the target, and use the word count in Word.

[techwriterkai]

Thanks, Dave - that's what we've done so far, grudgingly, I may add...

[rob hollinger]

There is a report for this now in V10.
Create a new Report in the Project\Reports folder - Choose an empty report.
Scroll to Project and choose Statistics.
Generate and you have everything you need for the translators.

Obviously using Lingo is a much better way - but this should help.

[rob hollinger]

The word count in the XML Editor (bottom left corner) is a very welcome enhancement in Flare 10. But how useful is it currently, if it's just a dead number on the screen?

We need it to do a little more for us. When we communicate with translators and others who use our topics, we don't want to open up dozens of topics, write down the word count, total them up, before we can tell them: "I'll have 5,700 words for you tomorrow." Instead, it would be great to have the word count as a column in the File List. Then we can select a bunch of topics, export to Excel, total up the word count and bang!

I realize this means to write the number into the topic along with the other file tags, but in my book that'd be a price worth paying. I mean they also contain MadCap:lastBlockDepth, MadCap:lastHeight and MadCap:lastWidth, and I guess the word count isn't any less useful...

A feature request has already been submitted. This post hopes to solicit more enlightened use cases or support for the feature request.

Including the above - now you can export your project based on the target/tags/ect. This will create a mini project you can then run the report for translators so you dont have to include everything out of the main project.

[techwriterkai]

There is a report for this now in V10.
Create a new Report in the Project\Reports folder - Choose an empty report.
Scroll to Project and choose Statistics.
Generate and you have everything you need for the translators.

Thanks, Rob - hadn't seen the new report, but it goes a long way towards what we need.

I'd like to uphold my feature request, as I still think including the word count in the File List would add unique value for ad hoc estimates.