Document Word Counter

About the Document Word Counter

Drop a batch of documents — Word (DOCX), PDF, OpenDocument (ODT, ODP), PowerPoint (PPTX), EPUB, RTF, HTML, Markdown or TXT — and get the words, characters with and without spaces, CJK characters, lines and pages of every file, plus the totals. Nothing has to be opened in its app, and nothing is uploaded: each file is read in your browser.

It is made for quoting translation, editing and writing work: add a rate per word, per 1,000 words, per character, per CJK character, per standard line or per page, with a minimum charge, and the amount appears next to each file. The whole table exports to CSV for a quote or an invoice, and you can view the exact text that was counted for any file.

Common uses

• Quoting a translation or proofreading job from the client’s files before accepting it.
• Checking a manuscript, thesis or set of chapters against a word limit without opening each file.
• Comparing the length of the documents in a project folder, or of slide decks and their speaker notes.
• Counting CJK characters for Chinese, Japanese or Korean jobs that are priced per character.

What is counted in each format

• DOCX (Word): the body, tables and text boxes, footnotes and endnotes (option), headers and footers (option, off by default). Tracked changes are counted as if accepted — deleted text is left out — and field codes, hidden text and comments are not counted. The page count Word saved in the file is shown too.
• PDF: the text layer, put into reading order with the same engine as PDF to Text; words broken by a hyphen at a line end are joined. Scanned pages have no text and are flagged — run OCR PDF first. For per-page counts and running-header removal, use the PDF Word Counter.
• ODT / ODP (LibreOffice, OpenOffice): paragraphs, headings, tables, text boxes and notes; tracked deletions and comments are left out.
• PPTX (PowerPoint): every slide in presentation order, SmartArt text and the speaker notes (option); slide numbers and date fields are left out. Hidden slides are counted and mentioned.
• EPUB: the chapters of the book in reading order. DRM-protected e-books cannot be read.
• RTF, HTML (visible text — no scripts, styles or page head), Markdown (the text as it reads, without the formatting marks) and TXT (UTF-8, UTF-16 or Windows-1252).

How words, characters and pages are counted

Words follow the Unicode word rules used by the Word Counter: don’t and well-known are one word, numbers are words, punctuation on its own is not. Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between words, so each Han, Hiragana or Katakana character counts as one word, the usual convention for quoting such text; Korean, which uses spaces, is counted by words. CJK characters counts Han, Hiragana, Katakana and Hangul letters, without punctuation.

Characters are the characters you see (an emoji or an accented letter counts once). With spaces includes spaces and tabs but not line or paragraph breaks; without spaces leaves out all white space.

Pages in the file are what the app saved (Word, LibreOffice) or the real page or slide count (PDF, PPTX). Estimated pages divide the words or characters by the page size you choose: about 500 words for a single-spaced page and 250 for a double-spaced one are common rules of thumb; 1,800 characters (30 lines of 60) is a widely used “standard page” (Normseite) in German-speaking and Central European translation, although 1,500 and 1,650 are used too (German Wikipedia, Normseite) — choose the size your client uses.

Quotes

The amount for each file is its units × your rate, rounded to two decimals (whole yen for JPY); the total is the sum, raised to your minimum charge if it is lower. Type the rate with a decimal point or a decimal comma — 0.08 and 0,08 are the same — and check it in the line under the form, which shows the sum worked out. Create a quotation hands the priced files to the Quotation Generator on this site (in your browser only — nothing is uploaded): each file becomes a line with its units as the quantity and your rate as the price, and a minimum charge that applies becomes a line of its own, so the quotation adds up to the same total. Tax is left off there for you to choose, because the counter cannot know whether GST or another tax applies to your work. Standard lines are characters with spaces ÷ 55, rounded up for each file — the unit German courts pay translators by under § 11 of the Justizvergütungs- und -entschädigungsgesetz (JVEG), “for every 55 keystrokes started” (gesetze-im-internet.de). Your rate, currency and minimum are remembered in this browser, and under Saved rates you can keep up to 50 named rates — one per client or kind of job — and switch between them; they are stored in this browser only.

Limitations

• Old binary formats (.doc, .ppt) and password-protected Office files cannot be read; save them as .docx or .pptx without a password first.
• Text in images, charts, embedded spreadsheets and scanned pages is not counted. Word and PowerPoint may count some of it differently, so expect small differences from their own counts.
• Word processors decide line breaks by layout; here “lines” are the lines of the text itself (paragraphs and manual line breaks), except for PDFs, where they are the lines on the page.
• Very large files are read in your browser’s memory; files over 200 MB are not accepted.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot. PDF files need the PDF engine, downloaded from MySmartCoPilot once (about 0.5 MB); your documents are read on your device and never uploaded.