(no subject)

[elliemurasaki.livejournal.com]

When a story is labeled as having 3387 words, its first chapter has (MS Word says) 3858 words, and the remaining chapters do not have negative numbers of words, something is wrong.

Comments

[californiaquail.livejournal.com]

I've noticed huge disrepancies between the MS word count and the FF document word count. I'm wondering if maybe they omit words like THE, AND, IS, IT.

[elliemurasaki.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but when Word says the first chapter is longer than ff.n says the whole story is, and the second chapter looks just as long as the first, and there's twenty more chapters after it...

[pukie.livejournal.com]

This has been bothering me as well, I had to do a lot of reading and word checking to make sure things weren't left out in the submitting process.


Silly FF

re: word count

[(Anonymous)]

I have the opposite problem. My ff count is quite a bit higher than Word's. I discovered that somehow the embedded instructions to format a Word document are being included in the count.

[darsynia.livejournal.com]

I know, right? I have a fic on ffnet that's over 12k words and it's listed as having about 3800. *SIGH&*

[hanfastolfe.livejournal.com]

Huh, I didn't know that. Or maybe the word counter is including all the extra HTML parsing?

Suggestion - try making a test Word document, upload it, then make a zillion changes but get it back to the same number of words in the Word doc, upload that. Word likes to do weird things internally when you make changes, even if you end up not visually altering the thing at all. If the word count changes then it's doing that, all right.

Alternate suggestion - work up something in plain old Notepad and upload that, and then check if there's a discrepancy at all between a Word word count and an ff.n word count in the text file.

Hmm. Puzzling.

[elliemurasaki.livejournal.com]

Wasn't my story. I clicked to the first chapter, registered what the summary page said the word count was, double-checked the summary page to be sure I wasn't seeing things, copied the first chapter into Word to word-count to be triply sure I wasn't seeing things, and came here to throw a polite little fit. That was a pretty good story that probably a lot of people aren't seeing because they're looking for 60K+ stories, which that one seems to be if one looks anywhere but at ff.n's word count, which means it won't even turn up under the 5K+ filter.

[hanfastolfe.livejournal.com]

Geez. That's pretty bizarre. In principle, word counting is fairly straightforward, but the devil is in the details, so I think that's what's tripping up ff.n. :\