I’m not quite following how the session target word counts are calculated. Today I started working on a chapter and noticed that the session target said I had written 490 words, however the chapter had about 580 words in it. At first I thought maybe this was due to some negative word counts from editing something else so I ignored it and continued with the chapter. Later on in the day after only having worked in this one chapter, the session target says 974 words and the chapter count is 1627.
So basically I know I’ve written at least 1627 words and I may have edited some but there is now a 500 word count difference which makes no sense to me. Can you let me know how the session target works?
Is it possible that the “Include in compile” checkbox on one of your documents is un-checked? You have the option selected to only include words from documents with that item checked.
To see if this is the case, take a look at the inspector for each document, or switch to outline view and enable the “Include in Compile” column, or visit File->Compile and take a look at the list of files in the Contents section; the check-box is visible there too.
Is it possible that you wrote in the folder’s text area instead of in a file’s text space? Look at the folder’s icon in the binder; if there is a tiny page laying on top of the folder icon, then that’s what is happening. Since folders can be “written on” in a metaphorically similar way to that of a manilla folder, while the compiled output won’t include that writing, this could account for the discrepancy.
I’m seeing odd things with the project targets window on my machine. Pretty much the opposite problem though. In practice, what should happen is that with “Documents included in compile only” selected in the Project Targets window, it should only count words that that show up in the “Contents” pane of the File->Compile window, and then only those with the Include in Compile checkbox checked. Further, it shouldn’t count words for document types that don’t have “Text” selected in the Formatting pane of the compile window (which is why I suggested that a folder might have some of the un-counted text).
Sorry I can’t help further. If you don’t get any response from an official person by next week (the end of their official winter break is this weekend, I believe), you may need to re-post your issue; posts with responses to them tend to get lost in the shuffle. Or try emailing support directly about your issue, maybe linking to this thread. Give it a day though–Ioa and maybe one other official person seems to be popping onto the forums lately, despite the winter break still being on for Lit & Lat folks.
I have a folder called Chapter 5 and a text document below it where all the writing is. The session target was increasing as I was writing but as I mentioned it doesn’t seem to accurately represent or maybe I should say it doesn’t match the # of words contained in the chapter/scene that I know were written.
The only thing I can add is that you should be 100% sure that you started at zero words for the folder in question, and that you didn’t hit the Reset button.
My word/character count seems to work as expected. Although, I could reproduce OP’s issue by following:
Start a new session
Set target words = 10 (make sure it says 0 of 10, if not, reset)
Pick a text document that contains at least 10 words
Now “pretend” you don’t like the first ten words in the current text document. Delete them.
Write ten new words … and then another ten.
Now, the documents word count has increased by ten. But the Project Targets dialog says 10/10. Which in fact is expected: I wrote a total of twenty words, but I also deleted ten …
Good point, Valle. The Project Targets counts deletions (even below zero) as well as new words, even for words that existed before your current session.
This might have been the case for the discrepancy in the beginning, but I don’t think accounts for the differences in the afternoon. I honestly didn’t pay super close attention to it because I didn’t expect any issues. Anyways, today I’m not seeing any aberrant behaviors so I might chalk this up to a solar flare. I will keep an eye on it and see if I can confirm the steps you outlined.
Doesn’t the session target restart every time you open the program?
So, if you started working on the chapter, then closed it and came back later, your current session target would show fewer words than your document, because it’s only counting what you’ve done in that “session”, not what you’ve done overall.
It does on the Windows version. I just checked the mac version at my house and it has different option to reset session count at midnight. This might have been my confusion after using the mac version in the morning.