Re: Countchars

["George Scithers" owlswickpress@xxxxxxxx]

Actually, an exact character count isn't all THAT useful to an
editor who's figuring out how much space the thing will take on
printed pages. What is far more useful is what's called in the
trade "printer's rule" -- set maximum line length to 63 words an
punctuation and space (but not, of course, including codes). Set
page length to something simple, like 100 lines. Then the length
of the file, on screen, in lines, divided by six, is the length
of the thing, in "words" by printer's rule.
Counting "words" this way credits very short lines as if they
were full-length lines -- but a short line takes up as much room
on a printed page as a full-length line does.
What we regularly do at Weird Tales (founded way back in 1923) is
apply printer's rule to a XyWrite-formatted copy of the story in
hand, and use that both to pay authors and to see how much space
the story will use -- uinless we've already translated the file
into Ventura and run un a set of page proofs.

George H Scithers
Editor, Weird Tales