Issue with Project Statistics

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I am pretty sure this is a bug. I have noticed it only since I upgraded to Scrivener 2.

The issue is, I have set the words per paperback page option to 250, and I have over 100,000 words, but the stats page is showing my paperback page count at way less than 400 pages. Unless I’m crazy, 100,000 words divided by 250 words per page ought to come out to 400 pages.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

By my calculations, the second screen should say 405 pages instead of 367. The page count is still wrong when I set it back to the default of 350 words per page (it says 262 pages instead of 289).

It’s possible that the paperback pages count is not meant to show the numbers the way I think, but in that case I think there’s a bug with the language somewhere.

Is the count possibly showing pages based on the number of characters rather than words, even though it’s set to words?

2

The paperback page count is based on the old publishing rule-of-thumb that an average “word” contains six characters (actually five characters and one space). This should give a better idea of how many words fit on a paperback page than using the actual word count. So if you set it to 250 words, it actually checks the character count and divides it by 1500 (250 x 6). Given that many of your real words will be small words such as “it”, “he”,“she”, “the”, “then”, “so”, “and” and so on (assuming you are writing in English), it is only right that the page count would be less than it would be if the real word count was used.

I note that this isn’t covered in the Help file (and the Help file is in fact a little misleading in this regard), which we’ll fix for the next iteration of the Help manual.

Thanks and all the best,
Keith