Word Counter - Count words and characters in text

Nov 29, '05 12:59:00PM

Contributed by: robg

Word Counter imageThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]

This week's Pick is a niche selection, but I find it quite useful, and maybe others will as well. I will mention, however, that the author has some other interesting apps on his site, so it might be worth a visit to see what else he's got...

In my job, I obviously have to write a lot. But much of the time, I have to write much less -- as in "Rob, we only have 500 words for this blurb, and you've given me 10,250; you'll have to cut it back a bit." Yes, word counts play a crucial role in what we write, as there's only so much space in the magazine each month. While writing in Word, obviously, there's a handy word count feature that I rely on. But there are times when I want to go back and look at something I've written in the past to get an idea of its length. During lunch hour today, for instance, I was writing a strange little blurb for my robservatory.com blog, and needed to get a word count for the entire Panther tips book.

The book exists in 18 separate Word files, one per chapter, as well as 18 'ready to print' PDFs. Counting the book's total words in Word is a chore--you have to open each file and run the word count command, then manually add all the pieces together. (I didn't think I could do anything with the PDFs, so I just ignored them.)

I figured there had to be a better way, so I went searching, and stumbled on Word Counter. The program can read many forms of text, including pure text and (most usefully to me) Word documents; it won't, however, work with PDFs. Using the program couldn't be much simpler -- you can drag and drop a readable file into its window, paste some text from the clipboard, or (my intended use), drag a folder full of files onto it. When you use either of the first two methods, everything happens in one window, and you just click a Count Words button to see the total characters and words in your selected text.

But when you drop a folder or multiple files onto the window, you get a new window that shows the program's progress through all readable files, along with a running word and character count. Depending on the speed of your machine and the number and size of dropped files, this could take a while to run. As a baseline point, processing all 18 files from the book, which consists of nearly 1,000,000 characters and 174,907 words, took about 45 seconds on my Dual 2.0 G5.

Note that if you're going to use this tool, you should read the page on the author's site about it -- he explains some differences in counts returned by his program versus those returned by Word, for instance.

You may not have a need for such a tool very often, but if you ever do, take a look at Word Counter. It does its job quite well.

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