Over on Github I currently have a pull request for the plugin “Novel Word Count”. I’m trying to get an overview if there are more people who would profit from this:
When using a page count in Microsoft Word and the like, you can see how much of the next page you’ve filled up with your text, so that the whole number of pages is enough, in Obsidian I find it useful to have a single decimal so you can see how much text you actually have.
What the plugin can currently show you is Note Title -- 1p, meaning that this note has 1 page worth of words. The default “words-per-page” is 300. However, because there are currently only whole numbers, if you have a single word it would say it has 1 page, and if you have 312 words it would still say you have one page (the change to 2 pages seems to be at 313 words).
Does anyone else who uses this plugin think it would therefore be useful to have a decimal number that shows you a little more accurately how much text in pages you have?
Good question! Because often I feel like that’s too exact or that doesn’t tell me that much. By that I mean that it’s also good to have a word count, but coming from having used mostly Microsoft Word I can plan better if I know the amount of pages I’ve written.
You have the option to show both word and page count. Or one or the other. Characters even.
Word counts are exact, but page counts are only ever an estimate based on the number of words per page you set. Given the imprecision, I doubt that there’s a real value to fractions of a page. I don’t think Word counts fractions of a page either.
If you want more precise page counts, you’d choose characters per page as the basis for the calculation.
Only my opinion. Others may like the idea.
I don’t mind if it’s added as an option, but would regard it as a degradation from a pure page count if it replaced current behaviour.
If precise page count is that important to you, I’d certainly suggest that you switch to having it calculated by character - it’s a very rough estimate when done by words.
