Words count

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raymond
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 315
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2005 9:33 pm

Words count

Post by raymond »

Hello,

Quite strange situation. I need to present an article of up to 5000 words.
Mellel told me (see the left part of the screen picture) that there are almost 4700 words, which is OK.
I need to present the article in a way PC world would be able to see it, so I exported it to RTF format and opened in in NeoOffice. The words count in NeoOffice (the middle part of the screen picture) shows almost 5300 words, (which is bad for me :) ), and then, I have imported the document again to Mellel and there (the right part of the screen picture) it shows me less than 4300 words. Crazy world.
http://skitch.com/jackriklar/d9dmg/scre ... t-07.06.59

Why is this incompatibility? And how I can manage the document that the PC side would have less than 5000 words when they would open the document with their Word?

TIA
donb
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 326
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 7:43 am

Re: Words count

Post by donb »

Word Processor programs vary a great deal on how they calculate words. I made a text in TextEdit and saved it as rtf. Here is a list of the total number of words as given by 13 word processors for that text:

Total
Words Program
60243 Mellel
60128 Open Office
60128 Lotus Symphony
60078 Lightway Text
60078 iText pro
60077 Nisus Writer Pro
60042 Pages
60028 Bean
60028 Schreiben
59816 Fraise
59778 Microsoft word 2008
59775 Think Free Office
58916 Smultron

TextEdit has no word count function as far as I can find.

So a discrepancy of 1327 between the lowest and the highest count! That is a discrepancy of 27%, or 10% if we discount Smultron;

According to System Services, whether word count is a standard function of Snow Leopard or is part of Devon's WordService, it gave a count of 59916 words in each program which supports Service, including Mellel.

So it looks like there is a major difference between how various programs count words, that Microsoft Word tends to undercount and Mellel to overcount. NeoOffice quit on me each time I tried to open the document with it, so I don't now how it compares in doing the count.

Don Broadribb
raymond
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 315
Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2005 9:33 pm

Re: Words count

Post by raymond »

My problem is as how the text will be counted on Word, which means when the file will be opened by Word, and your experience shows that on Word PC the number of words would be lower than those counted on Mellel. And if it so it is encouraging.

My question: Is it possible that exporting the Mellel file initially into RTF augmented the number of words in the count, and if I will export it directly to Word format, the number of words would be reduced on the PC side?

I have no PC to measure, so I don't know what will be the results.
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