When I call up the Project Targets box, it says I have nearly 45,000 words.
However, when I call up Project Statistics, and when I compile the manuscript, it says I have only 35,000 words.
What’s going on? Shouldn’t they be the same, or at least close?
Not necessarily. For instance I can put 100,000 words of text documents into the Draft, and the Project Target’s progress bar will say 100,000 words (give or take a few). Then I can go into the Compile window and set my “Format As” preset to “Enumerated Outline” then compile out a list of the document titles.
Now my Project Targets window say 100,000 words, and my Project Statistics panel says 35 words, or however many words it takes to print the names of the document titles in a list.
One bar counts the documents in a certain folder in your Binder, the other actually compiles the Draft, including and excluding various elements, adding text potentially, stripping out thousands of words as maybe, depending on how many notes you write to yourself or if you’ve chosen to only compile one chapter out of 10.
But in the Project Targets window, I have checked the box next to “Documents included in compile only.” Shouldn’t that mean that the word count here includes only what appears in a compile? Yet when I compile, the resulting document is some 10,000 words less.
That checkbox only changes one factor. If a document in the Draft has its “Include in Compile” checkbox disabled, then it won’t be counted if that option is on. This feature is for stuff like chapter notes to yourself, or old revisions that you’d like to keep in-place. They represent hard “offs”, stuff that will likely never be in the final output. They are also, incidentally, very easy to remove from the real-time counter without a performance hit. We can scan for that flag and keep track of it while you work. What’s not so easy to calculate in real-time are the dozens of other things the compiler can do to bulk up or slim down text.
Check in the Contents, Formatting and Comments/Footnotes pane. Those are the three places where radical content changes can be made. If you’ve typed 10k words of chapter text into folder items, for example—it might be omitted from the default compile settings. Our default presets assume the use of folder text for chapter notes and so exclude “Text” from the Formatting pane in the folder icon row.
Thanks. I finally got my words back by checking “compile as is” on every part of the manuscript. But I still don’t understand why this is necessary.
That should never be necessary. Compile As-Is is meant for special circumstances, like title pages, dedication pages—basically anything that doesn’t fit the typical look and feel of body text.
What as-is does do though, is force the compiler to output the text content of a document, even if it is otherwise not set up to do so in the Formatting compile option pane. It also forces that document to not print its title or any other form of meta-data, and it’s editor formatting will be used instead of the standard override (if one is applied).
So, it sounds to me as though you have something unchecked in the Text column, in the Formatting compile option pane—on a type and level of binder item that you write quite a bit in otherwise. The Formatting panel controls the overall structure in the top half, and the style of that structure in the lower half. By structure, I mean what sections will print titles, how those titles will be printed, whether those sections will print the text content from the editor, and so forth. Below that you control how that structure is styled in the mock editor.
You can read more about this useful feature in §22.8 (pg. 188) of the user manual PDF.
Okay, that did it. Actually increased my word count beyond what the Project Targets window indicates. Thanks.
That might be the titles that get inserted in that same pane. They won’t be counted in the targets (that just counts text content in the editor). So any extra checkboxes beyond “Text” will bump up your word count.