Before I switched to Scrivener, I used Microsoft Word. Since switching, I have not looked back–but for one thing. MS Word has a font condition called “hidden text”. This allows you to make notes in your text that are invisible to, eg, the word count. I have been trying to use the inline annotation function, or the comment function, as an alternative, but both are rather clumsy in comparison. I particularly dislike the fact that the inline annotation automatically increases the word count, as it makes it hard for me to see what my “real” wordcount is. Might there be a possibility of either incorporating hidden text, or giving an option that the inline annotation not be counted in the word count? Thank you!
Unfortunately, it’s a “no” to both of those, but not for any philosophical reasons. Hidden text just isn’t possible in the text system we use. We use the standard OS X text system for the Mac version, the same one that is used by TextEdit and Nisus Writer Pro (ours and Nisus’s are heavily modified versions of the text system, though). I had wanted to make it so that inline annotations could be hidden, and to this end I took out a technical support request with Apple a couple of years ago. Aki Inoue, one of Apple’s chief text system engineers, took a look at the issue and sent me some sample code that tried to do it, but even he could not achieve it without it throwing lots of errors and eating up text. So, given that one of the main Apple engineers who creates the text system couldn’t achieve hidden text in the APIs he is responsible for writing, I think it’s fair to say that it’s not something I’m going to be able to do! Also, I know that Martin at Nisus has been wanting to do the same for years, and he has not managed it either - and Martin is perhaps the biggest expert in Apple’s text system outside of Apple.
As for the word count in annotations, this is for speed reasons. The live word count has to be fast, and so it reads the text only and updates per character typed scanning in the previous word, using standard OS X word boundary methods. This process could be slowed considerably by trying to take into account formatting such as annotations. However, if you click on the word count in the footer bar, a popover appears which will show you the word count without annotations (it is calculated when you click on it). So getting this information is only ever a click away, at least.
All the best,
Keith