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January 31, 2008

tips

Pages is endowed with a whole lot of text counting options

Posted Jan. 31, ’08, 12:33 PM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Tips

Pages text countingIf there is one thing I love about Mac OS X applications, specially the ones designed by Apple, it is the presence of subtle features all over the place. These are the features that you probably wouldn’t find if you were looking for them but are more likely to stumble upon by accident. Once you do, you realize that it is quite possibly the best way that feature could have been implemented. I just unearthed one such feature in Pages, Apple’s word processing and page layout application, and being the dutiful blogger that I am, immediately fired up TextEdit to let everyone know about my find.

It is not immediately obvious but Pages has a word count feature neatly tucked away under the ‘Info’ tab of the Document Inspector. Among other things, it lists the number of words, lines, paragraphs and characters your document consists of. At first glance, you’ll see that these figures are for the entire document. But what if you want to know how many words are there in just that one particular paragraph? Or how many characters there are in the word ‘acanthocephalans’?

It turns out that Apple has taken care of that too. Theoretically, all you need to do is select the text in question and the numbers in the Info pane will immediately change to reflect the number counts for the selection, instead of the whole document.

However, it does not exactly work as unadvertised but intended to, at least in my case. When I select some text, the numbers in the Info pane simply (and rudely) disappear. They do change to the right totals when I select some other tab or Inspector and then return to it, so I guess it works, albeit not perfectly. If it works for you without any hitch, let us know. Maybe Pages is just a little angry with me, tired of playing second fiddle to twitchy little TextEdit.


5 Comments

Marc Estrin said:

Mine works without a hitch, and without going to another tab first. Numbers just change when any selection is made.

Marc

January 31, 2008 1:38 PM
dwc22 said:

Pages counting works as advertised for me. When I select a portion of the text the count is changed to reflect the selection.

January 31, 2008 1:41 PM
Nathan Hunt said:

Nisus Writer has a similar feature, which actually works.

January 31, 2008 1:45 PM
Anonymous said:

Works fine for me without switching tabs on the inspector.

January 31, 2008 2:04 PM
Daniel said:

Works fine for me too. That said, I miss the word count feature on Word: it was handy to know how many words I'd written on a given number of pages without having to highlight them all. Very useful with large documents containing large sections. Still prefer Pages though

January 31, 2008 3:21 PM

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