Yeah, it counts words. But it can also generate a list/table for a given selection of text, showing the frequency with which all words occur. I think it’s a great tool. I use this little app for every finished section/chapter, so I can see what’s going on with the ‘color’ of my work.
Do I need it built into Scrivener? Not really. But it would make Scrivener perfect, as far as I’m concerned.
Yep, as Dafu says, you can get this from the Text Statistics sheet (note that in 1.03, “Text Statistics” is called “Document Statistics”). Just click on the arrow at the bottom of the sheet to get a list of words with frequency used in the current document (and, of course, you can use it in Edit Scrivenings to get a word frequency list for multiple documents).
Best,
Keith
I think raustin was specifying that it’s possible to select a section of text and get word frequency info for that selection? I could be wrong. I don’t think Scr. does this, does it? It does it for the whole file, correct?
I’d like to be able to export the word frequency list to a CSV or tab-separated plaintext spreadsheet.
Actually, what I would like is some AppleScript or Lua or somesuch hooks so that I can actually do statistics with the word frequency lists. I’d like to see Kulback-Leibler distances between the distribution of words in each chapter. (Yeah, I’m weird like that; I have a tiny table of base-2 logarithms so I can manually set the exposure parameters in photos.)
I’m guessing that APIs and programming hooks are just not viable in S2’s release schedule. But hey, a word frequency export can’t be that hard. In any case, I’m more in favor of a timely release than of feature bloat, at least right now. (Must. Have. New Edit Scrivenings Mode. For Project. Due Monday).
AppleScript is still on the table, but you are right, not for 2.0. It was one of those major projects that if added in for the initial release, would have pushed everything back even further.
At any rates, the current frequency sheet is all there is. 