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A caution on the word count feature in Pages 2 Apps
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but in Pages 2, the word count feature (on the Info tab of the Document Inspector) excludes words in tables. So if you are writing word-count-critical documents that includes tables, you can't rely on Pages' word count.

[robg adds: I confirmed this with a simple test document--all words in tables are ignored for the word count. Depending on what you're writing, and who you're writing it for, this may or may not be a problem ... but at least we know what's included and not included. Neither Pages' help nor manual says nothing about this fact.]
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A caution on the word count feature in Pages 2
Authored by: Coumerelli on Sep 08, '06 08:04:10AM
[robg adds: ... Neither Pages' help nor manual says nothing about this fact.]

Neither says nuthin' huh? So it's full of documentation then, eh? ;)

Ok, so, my comment isn't constructive, it just caught me funny, thats all. An otherwise GREAT hint/tip.

---
"The best way to accelerate a PC is 9.8 m/s2"

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A caution on the word count feature in Pages 2
Authored by: alblue on Sep 08, '06 08:56:02AM

This strikes me as a good (if undocumented) feature. Most publishers don't want to count words in tables as part of the total word count; however, I can see how this would catch you off guard if you're using a table to do any formatting.



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A caution on the word count feature in Pages 2
Authored by: boxcarl on Sep 08, '06 11:46:32AM

Workaround:

Select all (Cmd-a), copy (Cmd-c), switch to Terminal.app. Type "pbpaste | wc" and press return. The first number is lines/paragraphs, the second is words, the last is characters. If you have Growl's command line utility (growlnotify) and a launcher like Quicksilver, et al., you can make a script file and bind it to a key combination.

My word count script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "   Lines,  Words,  Chars
`pbpaste | wc`

                        `date "+%H:%M"`" | growlnotify -s


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A caution on the word count feature in Pages 2
Authored by: billclinton on Sep 08, '06 04:19:19PM

That's not the only problem with Pages 2. It ignores the system-wide setting for degree of font smoothing. For example, I prefer "heavy" smoothing for my laptop's LCD screen, but Pages renders text much lighter. I've sent a bug report to Apple but I have a suspicion this won't get fixed.



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A caution on the word count feature in Pages 2
Authored by: boxcarl on Sep 11, '06 11:46:17AM