Is there any way to show page count at the bottom of the window along side “Words” and “Chars?” I’ve attached a screen snippet of the area I’m referring to. Ideally, this area could contain:
Pages: 17 Words: 4,266 Chars: 24,221
It’s getting tiresome to have to keep a calculator up to divide the # of words / 250 all the time; would be much nicer to just have the page count displayed.
I’m afraid there’s not currently, although this is a feature that will be coming down the line. The reason is that in Scrivener, there’s not really a concept of pages at the point when you’re typing in the editor, since all that layout is handled at compile time and the formatting you use when you export your manuscript may be completely different from what you use in the editor. Then also the project is made up of many different documents–how many of course is up to the user, but for some people these are as small as just a sentence or two, and not all the documents in the binder or even in the Draft folder are necessarily going to be stitched together at compile. Where page breaks are set, what kind of page padding, line spacing, etc. whether titles are included or additional notes or synopses all gets determined when you compile and would change the page number count drastically from what you would see just counting in the editor. When the “page view” layout does come to Scrivener, it’s still going to be only an estimate of what you get–to have a more accurate count, you’ll need to keep your editor formatting as close as possible to the compile settings, and each document will have its own count (since trying to keep a live count based off what you’re going to compile would slow down working in the editor), although you’ll be able to view all your text in a Scrivenings session to get the full count in the footer.
Meanwhile, however, Scrivener does do the math for you! Just open Project>Project Statistics to get a count of your project based on the compile settings. The top section will show the current compile group (usually the Draft, but you might see something else if you have a collection set to compile, for instance) and give you a run down of the numbers, and the lower half will give you the selection count. There’s a bug now where you’ll need to load the Options tab there and switch back for the selection count to update, but Lee’ll get that fixed shortly. For the draft count you should be pretty good.
Thanks very much for the reply. I realize the concept of “pages” in Scrivener is virtual, I was just looking for a simple display of ‘words / 250’ to show an approximation of the page count in the footer.
In the meantime, thanks also for noting the ‘Project>Project Statistics’ feature, that’s helpful.