Word Count Blog

With the winning march of Google as a search engine over the planet search engine optimization became a milestone activity for many of the corporate webmasters. Lots of companies helping businesses to climb on top of the search emerged in last 10 years.

But with the development of SEO people started to mix 2 essential content parameters — word count and frequency count. It’s pretty strange, since mixing them is like mixing time and distance in the speed formula.

Word count – is the total quantity of meaningful words (excluding tags) in the piece of text.

Frequency count – is the index of how many times a word or a phrase appears in the in the piece of text.

You can find an example of a classic frequency counter here and a word count tool here.

From the first look you may think that frequency counter outbeats word count software in functionality, because it counts both words and statistics. But if you put a tagged text into a frequency count tool you will disappointed to find that all the tags were also included into the word and frequency count.

So if you need to count the quantity of the meaningful words (excluding all the tags) to know the volume of the job done in the majority of the text and even graphics formats, you need a word count tool. However if you are writing a SEO optimized content and want to know, whether you have put enough keywords into it, you’ll need a frequency count web app.

I do love ski-tech and all the new opportunities driven by progress. Web helps the art and literature evolve. Some 30 years ago every writer was isolated during the creative process. If an author wanted to cooperate with another one, it doesn’t matter how – learn from him or write a book together, they had to gather in one place and work from a single location.

But with interactive blogging the situation changed. Both private and publicly shared blogs stared providing the cooperation ground for writers at all levels. And how is all this related to the word count?

Well, everybody who tried writing something knows that having a general idea is one thing and writing at least an A4 a day is another. All writers, both beginners and masters, need writing discipline. So a group of guys, who “wants to improve their writing and like building web apps” built a perfect discipline training tool called Word Count Journal.

The idea is simple – first day you write 1 word, second day – 2, and at the end of the year you have 66,795 words (in case you write only what you have to and not more). Like guys say: “Little by little, through the power of series, the total of your written words will add up to more words than contained in the average novel.”

I do like the idea. Just think it over once again – word count of your everyday creative output trains you to write a page of unique content per day till the end of the year. By simply following the rule of writing 1 word more every next day you can become a commercial blogger, journalist or a prominent writer in the next 365 days.

I made my start here and today have exceeded the planned word count 21 times. Feel free to join the initiative and leave a link to your own journal in comments to this post, so we can exchange the ideas and become more prominent writers and word counters

All my previous posts were related to the Windows-based word count software, but I thought that it is pretty unfair to forget about millions of UNIX users, so today we have a UNIX word count session.

Of course my UNIX experience is not that huge (it was all about testing a Fedora core under virtual machine), so below you will find mostly the reprints of the word count tips published in other Internet-media.

Word count using the “wc” command (taken from Wiki)

“wc” (short for word count) is a command in Unix-like operating systems. The program reads either standard input or a list of files and generates one or more of the following statistics: number of bytes, number of words, and number of lines (specifically, the number of newline characters). If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.

This is how to use the “wc” command:
• wc -l print the line count
• wc -c print the byte count
• wc -m print the character count
• wc -L print the length of longest line
• wc -w print the word count

Well, taking into consideration the languages that don’t use space mark, byte count will be very much appreciated by users from China, Japan and Thailand.

Word count without using the “wc” command (taken from computing.net)

After user Gburg inquired how to execute a loop to count each word in a file individually, without using the wc command, the following reply followed:

You can use the script below if your words are space seperated.

#!/bin/ksh
typeset -i I=0
{ while read line
do
for wort in `echo $line`
do
I=$I+1
done
done } < $1
echo $I

Many thanks to user Frank from everybody, except users from China, Japan and Thailand, for whom the script there should be another script

That's basically all for UNIX word count today.

P.S. Fans of the open source platforms will definitely like this video. Even such a Windows guy as me liked the trick

Let’s imagine that you are a freelance translator and your customer asked you to translate a contract. You eagerly agree and get…a scanned copy of the document. That’s cool if you have previously agreed that for scan jobs you are paid on a per hour basis. But what if not? What if your customer demands job to be done on a per word basis? And even worse…requests you to send a quote immediately?

Well, if there is a wish, there is a will. Let’s get a free OCR tool and fight the problem.

1. After googling for free OCR tools I chose a SimpleOCR. It is absolutely free for typed text and can be downloaded here (straight link to EXE file).

2. Double click the file and proceed with the installation, until you see the this.

choosing simple orc free mode

3. Click “Machine print” to access the free feature (see screenshot above).

4. Click “Select” to proceed to ther OCR features.

how to proceed for OCR

5. Click Process button to load the image.

how to load the files into SimpleOCR

Note: this is a sample screenshot made from a scan.

test english screenshot for OCR

6. Click “Convert to the text” button to start the OCR.

coverting image to the text

7. Edit the garbled and unrecognized words, to get a more accurate word count (the more spaces you have, the more “words” you are likely to get in the statistics later).

using suggestion tool to fix the document

8. Export the result into a DOC file.

saving the ocred text as a doc

9. After you open the saved DOC you will see a surprise… There is an image file in the doc and the text is duplicated (i.e. originally OCRed and edited one). Delete the duplicate text and the picture.

deleting unnecessary data to get the correctstatistics

10. Get some statistics using the MS Word built-in tool.

ms word stats after the ocr

If it seems a bit complicated or time-consuming process to you, you can submit your file to a free online OCR at http://www.free-ocr.com/ (OCR available only for English, German, French, Italian, Dutch or Spanish). Again, before using anything free and web-based think twice of the privacy.

Of course this just a temporary and quick one-time solution. If you need a quick and extensive word count (or any other statistics, like character and line count), it is better to use a professional word count software (accuracy means budget here). Moreover the commercial word count tool will provide you with accurate word count statistics even for Cyrillic and Scandinavian languages, which is far more than 6 or 7 offered by free OCR tools.

Have you ever needed to count quantity of the words on a web-page? Have you ever solved this task by copy/pasting the content into word processor and running statistic tool from there? And what if there is a free browser add-in capable of providing the statistics in the browser window?

Firefox boasts to be one of the most extensible browsers and even web humor proofs this. Today I’m reviewing a free word count Firefox add-in called Word Count Plus. It may be of a great benefit to you, so let’s get started.

Step 1. Install a Firefox browser.

For those who don’t have Firefox installed just download it here, and run the installation using default options (not a single problem even on Vista).

Step 2. Install Word Count Plus add-in.

Visit Word Count Plus webpage, then click Install version 1.3.0 button (the version may actually differ).

download word count plus

Firefox will prompt you to allow the add-in installation. Do so.

allow mozilla to install word count plus

Click “Install now” to install the add-in.

start word count plus instalaltion

Restart Firefox.

restart firefox after word count plus installation

Step 3. Start counting.

You can either press a word count button

getting word count statistics in browser by pressing a button

or right click it and get some shortcuts that make the word count much easier

word count plus shortcuts for faster work

Summary

Pros: 1) free; 2) flexible word count (you can count words in a first and the last paragraphs of the page with no copy/pasting); 3) supports addition and undoing the last action.

Contras: 1) a browser add-in (to count the words, you need to open a browser); 2) no bulk file processing (counting statistics in 10 files becomes a time-consuming task); 3) not full statistics (no count of alt tags, page title and keywords, as they are coded in fact).

A good tool for ad hoc use when you need to count quantity of the words or characters on the web page. Occasional word counters should thank Sam Waters, who built this fine app.

But professionals who need an accurate and full word count statistics in the html files, including the page title and alt tags text, should pay their attention to a professional word count software.