Critical Feature: Mac Status Bar & Targets for "Characters (No Spaces)" (For Billed Work)

[1944187392and]

Hi there,

I’m writing to share feedback and a feature request regarding character count tracking in the Mac version of Scrivener.

Currently, the “Characters (No Spaces)” count cannot be displayed in the footer status bar on Mac. Additionally, there is no option to set document word count targets based on characters excluding spaces.

For my work, submissions are billed and workload is calculated using the character count excluding spaces. Without the ability to view this metric in the footer, the real-time status bar is essentially useless for my workflow—and the per-document target feature also loses its practical purpose, as I cannot set goals based on the count I actually need to track.

From what I understand, the Windows version does display the “Characters (No Spaces)” count in the footer (I’m unsure if the target feature supports this there, however). I wonder if this was simply an oversight in the Mac version?

It would be incredibly helpful if the Mac version could add support for:

1. Displaying “Characters (No Spaces)” in the footer status bar

2. Allowing document targets to be set using the “Characters (No Spaces)” metric

Thank you so much for your consideration!

[AmberV]

Thanks for the notes. I had forgotten the Mac version oddly does not have this setting in the footer bar. I’ve moved the post over to the general area though, because while on Windows you can use no-spaces in the footer, both versions for some reason have no way to set a goal to that type, either for the entire project, per session, or per document.

I’ll write up some notes on how we could streamline this a bit, as well as making it better (for example, I think if you use characters/no-spaces, when you go to set a goal it should automatically use that setting instead of always defaulting to words. The whole program is very biased to those that use words to count, right now.

In the meanwhile, note that clicking on the footer bar brings up the modified stat (same thing you would have to do if you write like I do, with lots of inline annotations), and that the Project ▸ Statistics... command also is more accurate over all. For billing purposes anyway, I would always want to use the latter, because it pre-compiles to make sure everything is added/removed that would be (such as section headings). Anything that is “live” is an estimate, for performance reasons.