Commonly I’d like to get the word count for a selection of documents, which might be deeply nested in folders. Usually I’ll either use Project > Statistics, or right-click the documents from the corkboard interface.
What makes this difficult is that selecting a chapter in the binder doesn’t also select its contents. This makes sense to me as the default behavior, but for times where I do want to select a folder’s children, I’d like a context menu item like “Select children” or “Select inside”. It would also be handy to have the Words/Chars count in the binder’s context menu.
Here are two ways you can get the word count you want using existing resources.
Use Scrivenings Mode. In that mode, clicking on a folder will put into the editor pane all of the body text within that folder – however deeply nested its contents. The editor pane’s regular word count display will thus show the total word count for that folder.
In the Outline view, you can enable a Total Word Count column. Folders in the outline view will then show a word count which is the sum of the word counts of the docs it contains.
