Word count not updated when duplicating sections[BUG LOGGED]

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

Use-case: You’ve typed something up and you want to split it in to two separate scenes. Instead of cutting and pasting in to a separate scenes, you decided to duplicate the scene and then cut out the other scene. (Sure, it is more work, but it is still something a person would expect to work.)

Problem: When you do not count duplicated scenes toward the session word count, when the user removes the duplicate sections of the scenes, and all of the removed words count negatively against the word-count, the session word count becomes wildly inaccurate. That is, type 10 words, duplicate them, it still says you typed 10 words, then you remove 5 words in one and 5 words in the other and it reports that you’ve typed 0 words this session even though the Project Total still shows 10 more words than when you started. If you split the scene more than twice, you can get a negative word-count and find that none of your typing for the day moves your session target at all.

  1. Set a Session Word Count of 20
  2. Reset the session target
  3. Create a new scene containing 10 words. I used: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
  4. Double-check that it shows you at 50% of your session goal
  5. Duplicate the scene
  6. Check the Session Target, notice it stayed at 50%
  7. In the first of the two copies, remove half of the words
  8. In the second of the two copies, remove half of the words
  9. Check the Session Target, notice it says 0%

While it may be cheating to use duplicating scenes to increase your word-count, duplicating scenes as-is results is really poor writing except in use-cases where things are split out.

Allowing duplicate scenes to increase the word-count would cause the behavior to mimic the Paste behavior as pasting increases the current Session word-count.

2

I think I’m missing something. Why do any of this at all? Why not just use the split feature to cut the file into two pieces?

3

I thought I read the split feature didn’t work reliably in the beta.

However, I fully admit that duplicating a document isn’t the quickest way to perform this task. There are better, faster, easier ways of doing this.

Just because there are better ways of doing this doesn’t mean it isn’t a bug, though.

Every other method of copying text increases the word-count, and as cutting or deleting text removes words from the word-count this creates cases where a person can find the session word-count just seems broken. If they didn’t realize it was because they duplicated a document they can be left scratching their heads.

I noticed it because I should have been at about 70% of my session word count and it reported 0%. Since I had duplicated a document twice (resulting in three copies total), my session word-count dipped to -100% of the duplicated document’s word-count. The words I wrote in other documents weren’t enough to bring it above 0.