Re: Text analysis

[George Scithers Owlswick@xxxxxxxx]

Do keep in mind, O Group, that what most of us acquisition editors are
interested in is not how many actual words you are selling us editors, but
how much space your story or article will take up on the final, typeset
page.

The most accurate method of conveying this information -- short of
typesetting the story or article to the buying publications
specifications -- is what is called in the trade "printers' rule." This is
simply the product of characters per average mid-paragraph line (including
spaces and punctuation marks) divided by six, times the number of lines in
the story or article. Note: mid-paragraph line! A one-word paragraph takes
up as much space on the typeset page as does a line in the middle of a
paragraph. As for the total lines in the item, this is simply lines per
page times pages, with corrections for partly empty pages at the beginning
and end of the item.

And the easy way to get this with XyWrite is to set max line length at 63
and page length at 100, then go to the end of the file and call up the
page-and-line counter (remembering that the page counter shows what page
you are on, not how many completed pages precede the page you are on). The
"words" by printers' rule is then ten times the total number of lines, or
1,000 times the number of 100-line pages.

All this assumes that you are N*O*T leaving an extra, blank line between
paragraphs!

George Scithers of owlswickpress@xxxxxxxx
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Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 8:11 AM
Subject: Text analysis