Wordcount in the Editor footer has options for including/excluding footnotes, annotations, and comments.
That’s all well and good.
What about struck-through text? I see no good reason for that to ever be counted.
I sometimes will strike-through text if I am considering moving a paragraph or two to a different location. That way, if I change my mind, I just delete the copy of it in the new location and remove the strikethrough. But the strikethrough is used to bookmark the original position.
One more little checkbox in the footer of the Editor would be welcome, and not intrusive. Or just make it a preference setting.
Actually, writers who do NaNoWriMo often use strikethrough as a way to, ah, avoid word count deflation when working towards that all-important 50K gross word count.
Not to say that your wish list item isn’t a good idea! But there is at least one popular use case for counting struck-through words.
Yeah, that probably wouldn’t be a bad checkbox to add to the manual count pop-up, or maybe combine it with the comments & annotations checkbox, as all three of these are kind of the same thing: do you want editorial markings and notes or not?
At the moment you can get a “clean” count by selecting the whole section and using Edit ▸ Text Tidying ▸ Delete Struck-Through Text, and then Undo once you’re done.
The way I mark tentative moves like this, by the way, is with two inline annotations. One where the paragraph was, with something like “MOVED// P2” and then at the beginning of the moved paragraph, “P2”. That way I know which is where, and what to restore if I don’t end up liking the new flow. Since annotations aren’t counted in the popover by default, this doesn’t mess up the counts.
Assuming I don’t move it back and remove the markings while doing so, it is as easy to clean up the markings as stripping out struck-through text, with the Edit ▸ Copy Special ▸ Copy without Comments and Footnotes command, and then pasting over the original.
Dear Scrivener Development Team,
I hope this message finds you well. First of all, I would like to thank you for creating such a powerful and versatile writing tool that has greatly improved my workflow.
I have a feature request that I believe could be very helpful for many users: the ability to exclude text formatted with strikethrough from the project’s word count. Often, when revising drafts, I use strikethrough to mark deletions or changes, but currently Scrivener still counts this text towards the total word count. Having an option to omit strikethrough text from the word count would make tracking progress and meeting word count goals more accurate and convenient.
If this feature could be considered for a future update, I and I’m sure many others would greatly appreciate it.
Thank you very much for your time and for your continued work on Scrivener.
Best regards,
Per