Re: Countchars

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from "M.C."  Sun, 13 Feb 2005 14:04:21
+0100

> Very fine revision.

Thank you, Manuel!

> There is a spelling mistake in you help frame: "FM1" and "FM2"
> should be "FN1" and "FN2".

"FM" stands for ForMat. Because the /NF carve-out isn't limited to
FootNotes; it can be applied to any embedded command, whether it
contains printable text or not (RH, RF, NT, LB -- anything). See
the fourth example. My abbreviation isn't obvious? Perhaps I'd
better write it out as format1,format2, or command1,command2.

> The routine counts the number of the note in text (OK, it's a
> printed character) but it doesn't count the page number, if
> present, in the header/footer.

Actually, it doesn't count note numbers either. It can't count any
value that's calculated at the time of printing and not physically
present in the file when displayed in eXPanded view. However, you
could run COUNTCHARS against a print preview (TYS) screen. That
would count footnote numbers, current page number (PN), last page
number (FP), the evaluated results of any embedded VA or IS
commands, and so forth. Of course, it would also count white space,
including gutters and margins, so there's a downside too.

You know, Manuel, this routine started out as a little pedagogical
tool to show that the number of characters visible on the screen
doesn't always coincide with the number of bytes represented by
those characters (and to quantify the difference). I never dreamed
that anyone would use it to gauge the length of printed output! The
recent mods push it in that direction, but you can only stretch a
concept so far. I do think, at this point, we've got about as far
as we can go.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx