I do a lot of my writing in a DTP package on a rather obscure operating
system - purely because it is a package that I have used for many years and
am very familiar with. Often, though, I need to share my work with third
parties, which means transferring my work, using text files, into OOo,
formatting, and saving out in a standard format (depending on the intended
recipient). So far so good.

What I have noticed, though, is that if I do a word count in my DTP package,
and then in OOo, the results come out differently. At first I thought that
was because the two programs were handling, for example, hyphenated words,
differently. But a little investigation has shown this not to be the case.

Try this:

Turn off 'Custom Quotes' in Tools>Autocorrect, and type:

'word'
"word"
(with the quotes)

Now turn on custom quotes, and repeat the exercise.

Now highlight each word in turn and do a word count. With custom quotes
turned off, the word count is, as expected, one in each case. However, with
custom quotes turned on, the word count in each case becomes two.

This applies also to a sentence between custom quotes - one extra word is
added to the word count. This can, of course, add a lot of notional extra
words to a piece of work containing dialogue, for example.

As I write short stories, usually containing dialogue, for competitions
where word counts are important, this is not just a trivial curiosity!

Feature or bug?

Open Office 3.2.0 on Windows XP.

R.

-- 

  Richard Travers 
  [email protected]
  Truro, Cornwall
  

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