InDesign CS5 Word Count

[kcrossley]

Does InDesign CS5 have a built in word counter and if so how do I access it?

[Steve Werner]

Place your cursor in your story, and choose Window > Info to open the Info panel.

[BobLevine]

That will give you the story word count. If you have a lot of stories you can use Sandee Cohen's old trick of doing a find change for a space. Find the space and replace with one. InDesign will tell you how many changes it made.

Bob

[rob day]

If you are using OSX this AppleScript will get the document count:

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS6"

    tell active document

        set s to every story

        set t to 0

        repeat with i from 1 to count of s

            set t to t + (count every word of item i of s)

        end repeat

        display dialog "The active document has " & (count of s) & " stories, with a total of " & t & " words"

    end tell

end tell

[Colin Flashman]

Jongware also wrote a script to do this, but works for indb files too. This was featured from the indesignsecrets.com forum:

http://indesignsecrets.com/forum/indesign-add-ons-scripts-scripting-and-plug-ins/word-count-a-book

[Cynthia_ess]

You guys above are over thinking this haha.   If you don't want to count the words for the entire document just highlight the text you'd like to count then Window > Info (f8).

[kcrossley]

Thanks for the tip.

Guys (I'm one by the way) ALWAYS have a tendency to over complicate things.

[Ernesto Chávez Nuño]

Thanks! very useful!

[Laubender]

Hello Ernesto,

and in case you want to exclude all text on your pasteboard, you could simply use an ExtendScript.

Save your document.

1. Lock all page items in the document by the script below

2. Unlock all page items on all the pages of the document (that would exclude all items on the pasteboard) by the script below.

Then do your GREP search in the UI.

Example GREP:

Search for the first character in a word:

\<.

Replace found character with itself:

$0

Write down the results.

Revert to last saved state of the document.

Script snippet to lock all page items in the document and to unlock the page items on "normal" pages, only:

app.documents[0].pageItems.everyItem().locked = true;
app.pages.everyItem().pageItems.everyItem().locked = false;

Note: master page items will not be unlocked with this method so they would not count when doing a GREP search/replace action even if you allow a search on master spreads. The script could be expanded to these items as well. And if you search around in the InDesign Scripting forum you may find the appropriate code over there.

Regards,

Uwe

[Ernesto Chávez Nuño]

Many thanks! I will have to take a time to do that because I have never used an script, and have no idea about them

I apreciate you comment!

Thanks Laubender!