Thanks, Mary, I will download that.MaryinArkansas wrote: ↑October 5th, 2020, 10:29 am Thanks to Michelle for the word count demonstration. I hadn't thought about dividing longer chapters and doing numbered lists. Great information.
Regarding problems on counting words when downloading pdfs from Archive (or wherever) Foxit Reader is a good, free pdf program that will count text. https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/ (So far as I can tell, the free Adobe pdf does not count text.) Download the pdf then open it in Foxit Reader choose "Select Text" and "Read Mode" for the view. (at the top part of the screen) Then highlight the page/pages you want. When you've got the pages you want highlighted right click on the screen and a small, white screen will pop up showing several options...copy, select all, etc...with word count at the bottom of the white screen. Left click on word count and it shows the number of words in the section that was highlighted.
If I had had more time, I could have addressed the issue of downloading Full Text files from IA. As Colleen pointed out, they do come with some baggage, like repeated page headers and page numbers, but the same principle applies for getting a close approximation to a word count, and especially dividing up long chapters into shorter sections by viewing the page display in Word/multiple page view/20%. Exact word count isn't the idea. A ball park figure will do. I especially want to avoid what happened to me on my American Book of the Dog group project, where the 5th chapter (of 55 chapters) was 1.5 hours long. I wasn't doing word count back then, just Page count, so when I realized I needed to divide that chapter in two, I had to ask several readers to re'record their Intro and Outro who had already recorded later sections. Everyone was nice about it, but it created unnecessary work for us all, and as BC I felt I needed to do a better job. Thick books do often have very long chapters.
