Word Count Blog

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.