How can I find the total word count in my entire Indesign CS3 document?

use word instead

You can export the pages you want to count to pdf. Then open this pdf in Word. Word will the open the file and convert it. Word then shows the word count.

rdmz wrote: I have a book that consists of 10 different files and many many different text boxes. I need to find out what the total word count is for the entire book. Is there a simple way to do this, or do I have to copy and paste all the text from InD into a word file to get the number? Your help is much appreciated.

I seem to remember that there's a script or a plug-in that can do this, but it may be limited to one file at a time. Perhaps someone on the forum has a better memory than mine. Google finds links to scripts for "indesign export story script" (without quotes), but not for whole documents.

The differences between the find/replace methods mentioned in this thread may relate to whether or not text in master-page text, and paragraph auto-numbers and bullets are counted or ignored.

There's a button in the Find dialog box to ignore master-page text like headers, footers, and page numbers. To count auto-numbers and bullets, replace them with text. NOTE: Save a copy of the document set, and perform the replacement on the copy.

HTH

Regards,

Peter

_______________________

Peter Gold

KnowHow ProServices

Quick way is to use find/change. Find a space, change it to a space.

ID will tell you how many changes were made. Not an exact science but it's close. Other than that, the info panel shows word count by story.

Bob

A find and replace is your friend

Grep Find

([[:alnum:]]+)

Change to

$1

When you hit Change All you will get a "x amount of changes made", which is total amount of words and numbers (like 2010 and 50,000 etc.)

But that won't count symbols, like punctuation or €,$,£," etc.

To do that you need something like

Find

([[:alnum:]]+)|([,.;:'@#~!"£$%^&*()-+])

Change to:

$0

Then hit change all

Alternatively you could use just

([[:alnum:]]+)|([[:punct:]]+)

Change to

$0

To find all the numbers and text and punctuation in the document

the $0 will replace any found text, found text is represented by items in parenthesis.