While the word count and the ‘number of characters’ tally at the bottom of scrivener is convenient, I’d like to propose another counting mechanism for Scrivener. That is, a count that tells you what word you are at in the text, depending on where your cursor is at. For instance if my document is 100 words long (the word count being 100), and I want my cursor to be midway through the text, I would move my cursor until the count hits 50. That is, it would say this because I am at the 50th word in my document. I see this as being a beneficial feature, as it gives the most exact indicator of where I am in my text. True, this can roughly be approximated by the slider, I don’t feel it exact enough. Frequently I find myself asking when I’m editing, where exactly am I in my document. Scrolling and approximating where I am based on the grey spot is on the slider doesn’t satisfy. A simple number thus telling me where I am that would be a godsend.
I like this idea a lot.
There are many times when I’m filling in a form and have to conform to a certain number of words and/or number of characters.
My usual process is to pull up Open Office, get a word/character count and see where I’m at. Then edit it down, check again, etc. There are a few steps to pulling up word count in in OO. Not much of a biggie, but still a step is a step.
If I can plug it right into Scrivener, set my cursor somewhere and look down at the info bar that would be far easier. Heck, I’d probably use Scriv for filling out any form that has a word/character limit.
Try Shift-Cmd-UpArrow, check the footer bar, then RightArrow to return to where you were. On Windows, you’ll need to right-click on the selection to get the running count, but the theory is the same (until we get the footer bar business fixed so that it shows the currently selected text statistics).
oh cool! thanks!
Actually, when I come to think of it, it is not only the running word count that is the issue…
Suppose I have a 10,000 word document that I want to jump to the 50th word which, following which I want to jump to the 7500th word (in other words I want to go places that cannot be easily identified by scrolling). Thus a kind ‘go to’ word-number-mechanism is ultimately where this feature could possibly lead to. As it stands the slider/scroller becomes difficult to approximate and use in lengthy documents.
The shift-command-up arrow can’t really do this.
That’s quite an unusual requirement - I very much doubt many users will want to jump to a specific word number; it’s much easier to scroll down for that sort of thing. How many people would have any idea what to expect at the 325th word? So there are definitely no plans for anything like that! 
Master Kevin,
Ignore it. 'tis only young yos procrastinating, acting the idiot. At this stage of the game you should know better than to become involved.
Do take care, Master Kev,
[size=150]Le D[/size]
Yeah, yeah, say what you want weirdo Le D, I was actually being somewhat serious.
It’s an odd request, but I guess it comes from the way I think. Most people I assume when they want to search for a sentence or an idea in their document, think in terms of words. But when words fail or they simply cannot remember, perhaps thinking in terms of numbers can help. Scrolling towards a place, in a document is fine so long as the document is short. But when it’s long, it becomes very difficult. It would be interesting thus when you press command-f to search for a word, that there’s an option to search for n-th word in the document.
I only offer this as one way to solve the greater issue at hand. But I will admit that perhaps there might be a better way. I just can’t seem to think of one.
Have you disabled Apple’s iOS “inspired” invisible scrollers, in the General System Preferences pane? Actually having a scrollbar you can see and use makes trawling through longer documents much easier. I also prefer the option that makes it so the marker jumps to where you click, rather than having to grab it and drag it.
But that aside, what are you doing with Microsoft Word length documents in Scrivener. 
All right, each their own, but truly, I rarely have a section in Scrivener that is even taller than the 11" MBA screen.
I wouldn’t mind a jump to Xth word command.
Sometimes, just for fun, I like to keep track of my cumulative word count over a month or a year. Last year I knew I had hit my 1000000th word in a certain document, but had no idea which actual word that was. Yeah, I could have done the math beforehand and then paid attention while typing, but edits and such would no doubt have changed it anyway.
So having a Jump to Xth word would allow me to know: My 1000000th word this year was “the” (and then be disappointed because “the” is a pretty dull word for so significant a spot… 
)
I sometimes wonder what is better: have a long document spread over multiple scrivenings, or rather having it all in one long scrivening. The former requires you to remember where an idea occurred in a series of scrivenings; the latter requires you to remember where an idea occurs in a series of paragraphs. Which is more efficient is really dependent on the user I suppose. Some might argue that multiple scrivenings are more visual, thereby making things easier to remember. But having one scrivening, makes things less complicated, as everything is in one place. Everybody’s different, in the end.
Still, being able to search for the n-th word, and having a running word count identifier would be neat to have regardless of whichever method of writing one prefers.
Of course, but the principle difference between these two is that in one your “document” can be tagged at the very least with a topical heading, meaning the text you are looking at has a relevant table of contents (even if it doesn’t print out that way, this is for you, not the reader). And that scales all the way up to excessive amount of tagging, keywords, cross-reference linking between sections with References, labels, synopsis for even more “ToC” detail, and so on.
Meanwhile, with the approach of having 8k words in one file you get… nothing. Just text. You have to remember all of the potential navigation points for yourself. For anyone that does navigate quite a lot within a section, I think the advantages of having a tagged document are clear. The only drawback is setup time, but that fades into the background as you become accustomed to thinking in this fashion.
There are exceptions, and a myriad variations on how and where that line is drawn on when to cut something into pieces, but fundamentally: if you find yourself having troubles scrolling, if the scrollbar is just a sliver, or finding a place in your text requires searching, I’d say that’s a pretty good sign that you’ve got room to subdivide, and in a program that does not penalise your for doing so, makes it easy to split and navigate once split, where is the drawback? Keep in mind that with subdivision, you still get the relative merits of working in a stream of paragraphs, thanks to Scrivenings mode. With subdivisions you can have both methods at your disposal, and easily. If you shy away from subdivision to the point where your scrollbar becomes useless though, you lose access to a big chunk of what the Binder gives you.
Well, that’s my opinion anyway. Anyone that has downloaded the user manual project should clearly see which side of the debate thrive within. 
I even break out each menu command into its own section (though I did not start out that way, so some are still single files per primary menu).
I can’t imagine using Scrivener without breaking up my text into smaller chunks. It is, for me, the primary benefit of Scrivener. As AmberV says, you get the same look as a single document when you use Scrivenings mode, but with all the added benefits.
I typically have only one or two paragraphs per document. Because I can give each document it’s own title, this enables me to see very clearly the purpose of each paragraph and where it fits into the structure of my story/article/whatever. Of course, you don’t need to label them, you can just split a document into ever-smaller pieces and have Scrivener number them for you. Either way, it is then effortlessly easy to see at all times where I am in my manuscript, and I can access any section with just a few clicks in the Binder.
But to keep everything in one big long document like one has to do in Word? Oh my!! 
I always start off dividing my writing into scrivenings, but often more than not, I revert back to my Microsoft Word days and shove everything into the last scrivining because I’m tired, lazy, don’t wanna think, and want everything in one place. It’s strange that sometimes this method…just…sorta…works.
While I laud the method and while ideally i’d like to live in that world…I’m not sure it works for everyone.
I do both - when I’m typing, it just all goes into one long document - up to about 25k words.
I compile that and have all the paragraphs auto-numbered.
Then I Import & Split so that each paragraph becomes a separate numbered document for final editing and such. Fortunately I never need to rearrange the document order, but if you do just don’t number them first.
This sounds complex but, for editing purposes, is interesting.
How do you compile and have all the paragraphs numbered? I searched in the options for compiling and couldn’t find anything. Is this a Windows feature that’s not on mac? I’m running Scrivener on a mac.
I’m scared of using the import and split feature actually and do not know what it actually does. Does take the document and divide each paragraph into a separate scrivening? This would be ideal.
Both Windows and Mac. And that’s exactly what it does, but it’ll split the document at whatever character(s) you tell it to. So if you want to split on paragraphs just have it look for ¶ or maybe ¶¶.
In my case each paragraph starts with a predictable sequence of characters something like "i: "
So I use the replacements in compile to replace that with the auto-number code - and the character sequence I use to split on.
So it replaces "i: " with "##<$n>I: " (on a Mac, be sure to change the case of the thing you’re replacing - project replacements do some odd things when you replace something with itself.)
Then when I import and split I have it split at ## which results in each paragraph being a separate document, and the titles of those documents are numbered in sequence and have the first 5(?) or so words from the text in the title.
Cool. You’ve sparked an interest, sir. However, here’s the thing. I’ve already written a majority of my paper in one scrivening (it’s 18k words long), so it’s kind of time consuming to go back and put some character in front of each paragraph. There’s something fundamentally inelegant and messy I feel. I’m very visually inclined, and sticking a "#’ or “##” for every paragraph just seem kinda off…I’m wondering, is there a way to just import and split every time the return key or tab is pressed? I know I could probably figure this out on my own, but my document is sensitive and I don’t wanna screw things up.
It’s a good thing to know in future writings. Thanks.
Yeah, splitting it by the return key is no problem. That would look like this at the bottom of the Import and Split window.
Edit: You might need to type Opt+Return - I seem to recall reading something about that, but in my test I didn’t seem to need to.
And, yeah, like you, I didn’t like the ## cluttering up my document, that’s why I have those added by a replacement compile time. And I didn’t mention it previously, but the import and split process removes whatever character it’s splitting on, so there’s no ## in final scrivenings.
Edit 2: way back when, in Windows you couldn’t type a ¶ into the import and split window, so that why I went with ##. But I just tested, and now you can type a return character there, so that’s much easier all around. But I’m sticking with the ## because I’m stubborn like that. 