Word Count question

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I have been using Scrivener for a while now and after searching the forums, Google, and even the help file, I just can’t find the answer.

I tend to not write an entire chapter in a single document, rather I spilt it up in to smaller ‘scenes’ that can move around. I also write to a set of fairly strict formatting requirements in that ‘sections’ of the work, not necessarily chapters, need to be in a word count range.

Say section one needs to be 1200 words. I can have as many “chapters” as I want. In those chapters I will have several snippets that make up said chapter. I organize them all in folders within folders:

Section one:
-=> Chapter One:
-=> -=> Snippet One
-=> -=> Snippet Two
-=> Chapter Two:
-=> -=> Snippet Three
-=> -=> etc…

Is there a way to set a target word count for all the snippets in section one? As it stands now its kind of a pain and I really would like shut down the calculator app :wink: I did find that I could set word count for Section One in the Outliner, but it doesn’t seem to count inside the folder.

2

Hi,

Yes, you can do this using Edit Scrivenings. Open up the “Section One” document and set the target for that document (if it’s a folder then remember that folders are just text documents with a different icon and that open in the corkboard by default, so just click on Section One and turn off the corkboard so that you can see the underlying text document.

Then just click on Section One and enter Edit Scrivenings to check your progress. Edit Scrivenings adds together the word count targets for all documents in the E.S. session, so if you set the word count target for Section One to 1,200 and had no target for the documents contained inside Section One, then in E.S. mode you would see the word count of all the documents combined with the target as 1,200.

You can also check your progress in the outliner. Add the “Total Words” column - that will allow you to see the number of words for Section One including all of its subdocuments.

Hope that helps.
All the best,
Keith

3

Actually that did help a lot :slight_smile: Thanks!

Seems I tend to over complicate things. One of the many habits I am trying to break from being a windows user. Everything on my mac is just … easy … it tends to throw me off from time to time.