Counting the words in a folder

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi
Guidance please. In my work I need to know the word count of a folder of files. I know there is an Applescript in the edit menu to count words for a selection. However ideally I would like this viewable on a live basis in the main window. Does anyone know how to show the word count of folders in this way? Any help much appreciated. thanks

2

It’s not possible to modify the user interface via scripting.

3

OK thanks Christian. While I guess not a high priority, since I imagine its a quick bit of code, would be great to see this feature appear in 2.0 :slight_smile:. I guess a lot of others who use DT Pro to write would also like to know the word count of folders live - especially those who split a writing project into chapter folders. thanks for the quick reply anyway.

4

I asked for something similar – a way to search for documents by word count – that currently requires one to (I believe) query each individual file for its word count.

Perhaps word count could be calculated whenever a file is saved and entered as a value of a field in the database, if this isn’t done already. That might solve both of our problems.

I did something much like what you are looking for with AppleScript. Basically, I searched for all of my files with “Draft” in the name, then looped through with a repeat and added their word counts together, then updated my iChat status message with the result.

It looked something like:


tell application "DEVONthink Pro"
			set theWordCount to 0
			set theRecords to search "Draft" within titles
			repeat with thisRecord in theRecords
				set theWordCount to theWordCount + (the word count of thisRecord)
			end repeat
end tell

Of course, if you’re like me and want to preserve the word “Draft” in the titles of older drafts, it becomes a lot more complicated.

You could probably set up a smart group to trigger a script like this and have the script change the smart group’s name to the word count – but that’s hardly optimal, I don’t think.

I wish I could help more.

5

Many thanks. I will try this out.

6

Could content statistics be a feature in DTP 2.X?

Currently, the status bar reads something like “Filename (type, size, modified) … # paragraphs, # words, # characters” when viewing an RTF file, for instance. Nothing to complain about – that’s wonderful, I think.

If a group view showed something like the “# items, # selected” that it currently does, along with a “# paragraphs, # words, # characters” reflecting the totals of the documents in that group, that might be nifty.

Of course, I don’t know of a quick way to do that without creating extra fields for every document in the database, and there are things I’d much rather see in DTP2 than that, but I thought I’d suggest it. Even if it’s annoying or prohibitive in some way to code it, it doesn’t hurt to express the (mild) desire.