I searched for this but did not find it. And, I realize that the feature set is frozen. So, for future thought, I would suggest adding the document word count statistics to the meta-data header that is part of an export. It is available as a outliner column. It would just be nice to have it there in print.
At any rate, this software is simply amazing. You have made tremendous progress in a short amount of time. I promise to fork some cash over when the time comes.
cheers,
Tom
Not sure about as a meta-data header… Are you talking about MultiMarkdown export?
What I am looking into for beta 4 is an Insert > Word Count feature, which would insert a marker into the text and replace it with the actual draft word count when exported.
Glad you like the program!
Thanks,
Keith
Keith, for a moment I couldn’t fathom why anyone would ever want that, ever. But I do suppose that it’d be quite nice actually, to print out your stuff and see how far along you are in every section. I imagine the ‘insert word count’ dynamic field thingie would do just what OP would like.
If OP was asking for a MMD header, then it does bring to mind the fact that as this project matures and gains more publicity, you will need to find a way to make very clear where the boundary is between Scrivener and MMD, feature request- and support-wise. This is not the first time someone has asked for something which falls outside the purview of the app itself. It is a tendency which will not scale well, I fear.
(I do not want to come off as contempuous or irritated by OP, so I apologize if I have. The relationship between MMD and Scrivener is a matter not crystal clear to those new to both.)
Cruxdestruct, do you have any suggestions for how I could make it more clear to the new user in my response to this divide, in the FAQ? It is sometimes hard to see things from the point of a new user when you’ve been heavily involved in the process.
Well, the first thing is that no one should be able to post anything until they go to the FAQ, print it out, read it, sign at the bottom, and airmail the signed copy to Keith. I think the main problem is that people assume that MMD is part of scrivener, don’t know EXACTLY what it does, but plow ahead anyway. Which is what I would do.
But assuming they’re reading the FAQ to begin with: I would say in the ‘What is MDD’ section, we could put a bit that simply explains what kind of thing MMD is. ‘If you don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it’ is fine and good, but there’s gonna be a lot of people who will be trying to play around with it even if they only have a very basic understanding of what they’re doing. It’s that sort of thing—it lets you make html and pdfs, I’m pretty sure—that needs a bit of gentle explanation.
The first paragraph should be a simple explanation to the person who has never heard of MMD before, and now sees it in their menu. MultiMarkDown(link to fletcher’s wiki) is a way of writing structured documents in plain text. Using a simple, human-readable syntax, you can use it to create a variety of typeset documents in different formats. MMD is not a part of Scrivener, but Scrivener does include the ability to export your documents through the MMD interpreter. Something like that. Maybe… hell, maybe even a window that displays the first time you click ‘MultiMarkDown settings’ or something, saying, you know—this is not a part of Scrivener, if you want to know what it is, click here. That sounds icky as hell, though.
EDIT: I would also link to the FAQ at the top of Tech Support. The problem with FAQs in general is that I know I, personally, will absolutely ignore any post in any forum that’s stickied. So many of them are boilerplate “how to use the internet” posts that they have become invisible to me. The FAQ is really valuable, and has a lot of crunchy stuff, but I think there needs to be a way to make it way more intrusive.