Nanowrimo.org doesn’t sport a word count verification tool any more.
The obfuscation part could stay for obscure reasons (because who would want obfuscated text for what reason?) The NaNoWriMo part of the title of the Compile Format in the Plain Text File type should be removed.
Thanks for letting us know! We’ll get that fixed for the main event in November.
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Just a note to let you know that people might still use obfuscation of their text, for the reason to obscure text that they don’t want to share yet in an output document.
I can imagine it would be helpful for showing screenshots with obfuscated text as well, not yet wanting to reveal content of a novel to be. Wouldn’t know how that would work, exactly…
It wouldn’t work too well as it stands, since that Format is only available to plain-text and doesn’t really have any layout settings, it’s pretty bare bones. For someone to demonstrate a problem with their output, they would need to work more from whatever compile settings they are currently using.
Honestly that approach is so old it predates regular expressions. These days it would probably be more efficient to put something like \w ⇒ X into project replacements if you wanted to show a layout issue without disturbing the overall “shape” of the text.
My suggestion would be to Compile a selected document and paste it back into a Duplicate of a large document. It would still show the title in the screenshot, and maybe a Synopsis, but the text would be unreadable.
If you obfuscate an original, the intrisic danger exists of obfuscating text you want to read back, while the obfuscations can’t be undone.
Oh you mean modifying the project itself? What I suggest when people want to send in a sample but cannot, or do not want to, send the original text is to use Save As with a clearly marked file name, and then use Project Replace to mangle the global text, snapshots and all. It takes a few seconds and nearly all bugs and issues can be conveyed in that fashion. The notable exceptions are stuff like placeholder-based issues, since obviously those get mangled too.