I’m wondering if there is a way to make page numbers appear in my document prior to compiling, so I can get a sense of chapter length as I’m writing.
Thanks!
There isn’t such an option, but you can get a sense of how many pages your manuscript will come out to be by looking at Project->Statistics. The “Paperback” pages can be manipulated by changing how many words (on average) are on a page for whatever you count as a page. The printed pages stat is (I think) how many pages the project will take up when compiled with the current settings.
Thanks, Robert. 
As part of that, you can also get the count for just the selected documents, so if you’re interested in a particular chapter length, select those documents in the binder and then check the Selection count in project statistics to get the same stats just for that section.
I still don’t understand how the project statistics work completely, as the “Pages (printed)” has never worked. It never gives me an accurate projection based on my compile settings, and I’ve always had to rely on “Pages (paperback)”. I suppose I might be doing something wrong, since apparently every single other person can get it to work, but none of them can seem to come up with an actual way to fix my problem. Oh well, the paperback option works better than nothing, so I guess I’ll stick with that.
I’ve never relied on the project statistics, so I hadn’t tested it’s accuracy before. I just did, and got inconsistent results from the compile output. I tested by compiling to PDF, getting 69 pages in the PDF. The statistics show Pages (printed): 75, which is off by 6 entire pages.
The current version is using a less accurate method for compiling the page count, so there’s been some changes that will be coming in the next release that will provide a better estimate, and this will probably be revisited again come version 2, when some other fundamentals of the text system get updated.