Show character count progress indicator

[lechbaczynski]

Feature: Show characters (with spaces) count for the whole text, here:

[gedakc]

Thank you @lechbaczynski for your interest in Manuskript. I noticed you also provided a PR.

Normally publishers, writers, and sometimes readers are interested in the word counts for works of fiction and non-fiction. However in my experience I have not encountered a situation where the character count is important.

What is the purpose of adding character count, and who uses it?

One reason I ask is because Manuskript has been criticised in the past for being too cluttered. We are trying to keep distractions to a minimum so that writers can focus on creating their work. That is why I am questioning the need for a character count statistic in the editor.

Regards,
Curtis

[lechbaczynski]

For most of (over 90% I suppose) of writing contests - short story contests, and also some novel contests, etc., in Poland there is a limit in the rules, given in characters count.
like for example 10.000 chars including spaces, or 27.000. Sometimes there is also a minimum char count (incl. spaces) stated in the rules.

See some examples:

"znaków" - means characters
"konkurs" - competition
"tys." - thousands
"opowiadanie" - short story

see the second example - the contest rules state: short story of maximum 30.000 chars, or story idea/draft of minimum 3600 chars and maximum 9000 chars

The same for some novels ("powieść") that publishers seek:

[lechbaczynski]

Real life example - yesterday I finished writing short story for competition,
the limit was 10.000 chars including spaces.
I wrote in Manuskript run form sources form my forked github repo - with char count feature.
The feature was very useful, see the sum of characters in all scenes on the screenshot:

[lechbaczynski]

Also, other programs have char count
minimalistic Focus Writer, see:

http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/focuswriter-theme.jpg

and even Scrivener:
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/assets/image/scrivener/features/windows/win-1-binder-editor-inspector.png

[gedakc]

Thank you @lechbaczynski for the additional information regarding the use of character counts in writing competitions. It would seem that a character count would be a useful addition to Manuskript.

I will post some suggestions for enhancement in the PR you created.

[deerainw]

In some languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, we can't find even one space in a long paragraph in most cases.
If I paste a very long Chinese article which contains 10 long paragraph into manuskript, the info 10 words on status bar is useless.