iOS Line Count

Scrivener Wish List
1

I’ve done my research to find out whether Scrivener provides a line count in its iOS iteration. I love everything about the software, but the lack of a line count makes it fairly inconvenient for my purposes. If there was an option to change the word count into a line count, or if there was a way to display line numbers on the side of the page, my experience would be much improved. For clarity’s sake: I write book-length narrative poetry which is structured using strict mathematics. I’m not about to tell you that the demand for this feature would be high, but I also don’t think it would clutter anything. It would also make Scrivener absolutely perfect for me.

Thank you for developing this product; there’s more care and utility in it than in any other word processor I’ve ever experienced. Have a good one!

2

Although I can’t promise anything, could you please clarify what you mean by line count? There are a number of ways of counting lines:

  1. Soft line count - this includes lines within a paragraph as they are wrapped across the display. So a single paragraph has several lines. This is quite expensive to calculate and is probably useless for most purposes anyway.

  2. Hard line count - this is the number of paragraphs. This is the fastest to calculate.

  3. Hard line count not including empty paragraphs. In other words, a count of real paragraphs not including empty lines. I imagine this is what you are after. This could also be a little slow to calculate live for every word typed, but it might be possible to think of another way of displaying it.

All the best,
Keith

3

Thanks for the reply! I imagine that the third option is the one which would do me the most good, assuming that any return counts as a new paragraph.

Here’s an illustrative example of my situation: I’m currently writing a poem that needs to be exactly 10,947 lines long. Each book of the poem needs to be a specific length as well. I wouldn’t be counting empty lines, but if the program did, I could easily work around that. Honestly, I could easily work around most complications, I just need some way to tally the lines without having to count to 10,947 myself.

Your help is much appreciated. I understand that the feature won’t necessarily make it into an update, but it means a lot that you’re willing to consider it.