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The new LO 3.6 displays a word count in the status bar. Word count is used in the USA, but not in other countries, where character count is used instead. I wonder if this behavior can be changed in the preferences, otherwise this excellent new features would risk to be useless in a considerable part of the world.
A workaround could be: Insert a field in your document for the character count which is updated while you type. Menu Insert->Fields->Other: Tab Document-Statistics / Character count and click insert.
If you double-click on the word count a statistics window pops up with your char. count.
Another nice options would be to select your counter in the Status Bar with a right click. Calc has a similar feature for the "sum=xyz" in the status bar, you can select from average, Min, Max ..
Submit an enhancement bug here. I think it is a nice feature.
That's not entirely true. Here in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, we use the word count feature consistently. Often it's because we're submitting to US journals or conferences, but it also holds for many European journals, too. That's not to say that a character count would not also be useful, though.
Menu/File/Properties/Statistics
Word count or character count is really a matter of languages and cultural or historical background. US influenced countries use word count, in Germany it is or was character count, in Japan it is character count. I assume that China also uses character count as the Japanese characters have there origin in China. As for the Koreans I also assume they are using character count because the Chinese characters came through Korea to Japan..
All counting is related to space for printing. Here character counting is more precise because word count is based on a certain average number of characters for one word. I don't know if there is an official value for such an average value, but if you use a longer text and count characters and words you can establish the ratio pretty well. I assume that this value depends also on the language you are using. As for precision it all depends on how precise you need/want to be.
In terms of space on paper, Japanese needs less than English or German to document on paper the same content. Chinese should have a still higher information density than Japanese.
I am looking forward to 3.6.4, which I will install as soon as it comes out to see at the function mariosv indicated.
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Asked: 2012-08-14 02:39:30 +0200
Seen: 2,858 times
Last updated: Dec 13 '12
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