Cumulative word count in footer

Hi, I recently got an important school assignment in which the teacher requires us to include a word count that adds up on the bottom of every page (the footer). Is it possible to automate this task in LibreOffice Writer?

It would also be nice if I were able to remove some text from the word count such as the title, which, as per the assignment marking criteria, does not affect the allowed word limit.

Thanks in advance.

When creating your footer, follow these steps to insert the required word count.

INSERT–>FIELDS–>OTHER

TYPE: Statistics
SELECT: Words
FORMAT: As Page Style

This will insert a grey box that is labeled STATISTICS. Add a space and then “words” or something along those lines so you know what the number printed means.

To see what it will actually look like, type some text in your document, and then select:
FILE–>PAGE PREVIEW

You can then close your preview and go about editing your document once again.

Unfortunately, this method also includes any words in the Header, Footer, and other parts of the document that I’m assuming you probably DON’T consider part of your actual word count.

I think the question is asking whether a running, cumulative word count field or facility is available. For example, given three pages of text with 400 words per page (in the main body area), the word count field in the footer of each page should read: 400, 800, 1200. Furthermore, the ability to exclude certain content types (e.g., paragraph styles: heading N, header, and footer) from this count is desired. I would imagine that is a fairly complex operation requiring extensive style checking (assuming styles are even used).

This would appear to relate (at least partly) to FDO#59255, for which there is no current solution. The ODF v1.2 specification does not appear to support this type of facility and/or field. Relevant word count definitions include:

7.5.18.1 General The contents of <text:word-count> and
<text:character-count> elements are
locale specific and are not defined by
OpenDocument.

7.5.18.4 <text:word-count> The <text:word-count> element displays
the value of the meta:word-count
attribute of the
<meta:document-statistic> element of
a document. 19.339

19.339 meta:word-count The meta:word-count attribute specifies
the number of words that an
OpenDocument producer has counted for
a document. The value of the
meta:word-count attribute is
implementation-dependent.

@Superuser,

Just to clarify, it sounds like

  1. you’re asking for a wordcount of the current page, located at the bottom of each page in the footer.

  2. You want to only show the word count as a integer (with no extraneous labels)

Is that right?