Word count in Affinity Publisher

[vdamjanovski]

I like the Affinity Publisher concept, and already worked on a few brochures and documents. All seems good, but I can't seem to find the word count function.

Has it been forgotten, or I just simply can't find it?

[Joachim_L]

There is no word count feature (yet?). But it seems valuable to many here. There are several discussions here about this feature.

[cpoh]

I too need this on a daily basis and am missing this feature a lot while transferring from InDesign to AP.

My use case is layouting a small newspaper and getting the texts from about 6 different people.
I have to go on a layout after content principle. This means the writers don't care much about the correct length of their articles and after the first layout run i do have to tell them "this could be xx characters longer" or "this have to be 234 characters shorter" etc.

For the last years there is the handy "info tool" in indesign which i use for:
- See the total count of characters in the text's columns (linked)
- See the count of characters in marked text
- see the count of overflowing text (that's for me the most helpful part)

As stated above, this whole counting is a feature in almost every software that deals with text and should be in AP as well.

[Molly M]

Couldn't agree more. People us word count specs all the time in all kinds of things... There should be a way in Publisher to find that out. 

[Oval]

Asked and ignored since 2018 … basic for layout, could be made in minutes.

[wonderings]

There are a lot of basic things needed in Publisher and everyone has their own ideas of what should be first and is what most important. This is new software that will hopefully develop and implement all the features people need in order to match and be a viable alternative to Indesign. It is not there yet, so if you need key features then best to wait till Publisher has what you need. 

[Molly M]

Oh, don't get me wrong... it's just a small complaint of mine. I've already replaced my Adobe programs with the three Affinity programs because pretty much ALL of the tasks I was so used to doing in Adobe are duplicated in Affinity, and some Affinity does that my Adobe programs don't do. I'm really not trying to complain, especially because of the pricing. This just seemed like it would be a good feature to have, so I thought I would second the motion...

[garrettm30]

@Molly M For what it's worth, I don't think Wonderings was targeting you specifically by the post. This is a feature request section in the forum, and your comment was not out of line. I interpret it as merely agreeing with the request.

[gumbo23]

Is there a word count feature yet?

[Joachim_L]

No. The actual beta has also no word count.

[David Thistlethwaite]

Everyone seems very calm about this, but not to have a word count feature, when publishers typically ask for a certain number of words, is massively frustrating. For me it means taking all my text off Publisher and putting it in some other 'normal' programme like Libre Office that counts it on the screen all the time. 

If Publisher wasn't so good, this would not be a problem.

[cpoh]

Not everyone!

I miss this every day in my work and have to work around this usinig text editors (yes, simple things as these can actually count! ;-)) and Word (say nothing!).

Personally i think it's quite embarassing for an publishing software not to care about word-counts.  But nobody seems to care (a lot). For those of us who interact professionally with authors etc. it's quite annoying not to have this feature. But as long as Publisher relies not on Quantum Computing, a "traditional" counting should not be a bis problem.
EVERY other software in this field can do this (not to mention EVERY other "work with texts"-software.. Come on, Affinity, you can do this. Don't want to use AI anymore

[Oval]

1 hour ago, cpoh said:

Affinity, you can do this

No, it can’t! :-)

[Blende21]

For those on a Mac: If you install the PopClip app (menu bar helper, costs a few bucks), you get a character and word count feature for selected text, among other useful pop-up-menu functions.

Not as good as counting inside of the Publisher app could do, but it does the job as a workaround.

[David Thistlethwaite]

Thank you so much for your responses. Unfortunately no Mac app will help me.

I'm still hoping to hear from Serif that they have this in hand. All those sensible people must care about this.

Also, I was looking for that little button that looks like a Paragraph sign that enables you to see the spaces in between words, returns etc. Can anyone tell me where it is?

[Blende21]

15 minutes ago, David Thistlethwaite said:

Also, I was looking for that little button that looks like a Paragraph sign that enables you to see the spaces in between words, returns etc. Can anyone tell me where it is?

Menu Text, second option from the bottom (show special characters or something like this).

[David Thistlethwaite]

Thanks, that's a help.

[Bogdan]

Hi,

Any update on the word count feature? It is very useful for any document.

Thank you!

[furtonb]

Hi, 

Writing any kind of text without knowing how long that actually is in a digital environment is really making my head spin.

I'm writing a thesis now and that would become really helpful, if I knew how many characters I'm at. I've written the plain text elsewhere, but since I've started formatting the thing, I'm adding and reducing stuff in Publisher - silly me thought it would be a good idea - now I'm wasting a lot of time to copy and paste.:(

Could it be added as a feature request? I haven't seen anyone replying from Serif. @MEB?

A total count would be really nice to have (sentences, words, characters with or w/o spaces), ideally I imagine a small interface with all the text styles, where you can tick a checkbox to include a certain style in the count or not (similar to the TOC interface).

 

[fde101]

On 11/19/2020 at 3:00 PM, furtonb said:

I haven't seen anyone replying from Serif.

That is normal.  In most cases they do not reply to feature requests.  They read them but do not (usually) reply, and in particular do not ordinarily provide estimates of if or when a feature might appear, as a matter of policy, because of some issues they had when trying to do so in the past.  The best you can do now to estimate when it might show up is to watch for it to appear in the betas.

[Oval]

13 hours ago, fde101 said:

They read them

Would be great if there would be an automatic indicator (was read by Serif).

[furtonb]

Yeah, I know they are not replying very actively to feature requests - I've bumped @MEB just to get some reply on this thread someday in the future.

I am a happy user of Affinity Photo, but features like this make Publisher essentially unbearable to use for strict deadlines.

As Designer was essentially unusable in my workflow due to the lack of "Select Same" feature (I only tested it in the last Beta, but I don't have Designer in my workflow at all right now), Publisher is a serious headache for editing large text based documents without knowing how long that thing actually is (in total, selection or paragraph or section-wise) - not to mention doing something remotely scientific, as stating your sources in an ordered fashion, a.k.a. footnotes or endnotes. I guess I'm just a minority who really needs a few of the most requested features based on user reply - I guess knowing how long a document is can wait a few years down the road.

Yes, I know that Affinity Publisher is a new product (which I like for casual use - like a few pages of marketing brochures or my portfolio), and they cannot respond on developed features due to company policies and blah blah blah...

(Going to get 2 months of ID sub due to these, ffs really)

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, furtonb said:

unbearable

You would say that, wouldn’t you!

[furtonb]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

You would say that, wouldn’t you!

damn, I'm usually into puns and jokes, but missed this one:D

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, furtonb said:

Yeah, I know they are not replying very actively to feature requests -

It is not that don't "reply very actively", it is that "by policy", they do not reply. They do not comment on what features they might include, nor when they might include them. Replies in this forum from Serif are usually reserved for greeting new forum members, or correcting mistakes, or for soliciting additional information if a request is unclear.

(They also discourage tagging a Serif staff member who has not already been involved in a thread.)