Chapter 13 · The Editor
Word Counts, Page Counts, and Daily Goals
Skarvia shows several numbers about the same manuscript, and they are allowed to disagree, because they measure different things. This chapter says what each one counts, which of them follow you to another computer, and what to do when one sticks.
What counts as a word
A word is a run of characters with no whitespace in it. Skarvia joins your blocks with a paragraph break before counting, so the last word of one paragraph and the first of the next stay separate rather than merging at every paragraph boundary.
Everything in the document is counted, including runs marked for deletion in Suggest mode. A struck-through sentence is still in the manuscript until somebody accepts or rejects the change. The one place that rule flips is the fact-checker, below.
The two readouts
The same counts appear in two places, with slightly different contents.
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Document bar, top, beside the save state | Words, then one format figure: ~24 pp for a screenplay, ~11.4 min for a video script or audio drama, on-screen pages for everything else. |
| Status bar, along the bottom | Words, then ~24 pages for a screenplay or ~11.4 min for a video script, then Page 4 of 31, your session change, and the goal. |
Two differences are deliberate. An audio drama shows its runtime at the top and not at the bottom, and a novel or stage play shows no second figure in the status bar, because its page position is already there as Page 4 of 31.
Three kinds of page
"Pages" means three things depending on what you are writing, and Skarvia never mixes two of them in one unlabelled number.
| Kind | Where it comes from | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| True Courier pages (screenplays) | The editor paginates the script to industry metrics and draws the real breaks in the manuscript. | The script. Nothing about your screen. |
| On-screen pages (novel, stage play, video script, audio drama) | The height of your text against a US Letter shape, which the page lines across the paper and Page 4 of 31 also use. | Type size and line spacing. |
| Manuscript pages (novel, optional) | Words divided by 250, rounded up: the Shunn convention an agent means by "pages". | Words alone. |
Manuscript pages are off until you ask for them. Open the View tab and tick Manuscript pages, and the document bar adds a labelled second figure: · ~312 manuscript. That checkbox is stored in this browser, not in the document, so it does not travel. Chapter 12 covers the View tab.
Screenplays never show Page 4 of 31: the engine owns their pagination, and a second estimate would draw disagreeing lines beside the real ones. All of these are live editor figures, and an exported PDF is measured with true print metrics, so it can differ by a page or two. Part VIII covers export.
Minutes, for the timed formats
A video script and an audio drama get a runtime rather than a page count, estimated from what is spoken:
- Video script. The audio column only. What is on screen is on screen for as long as the words beside it last, so the visual column adds no time. A row you timed by hand keeps the time you gave it, and any row counts for at least one second.
- Audio drama. Dialogue and narration only. Sound and music cues carry no duration the script knows about, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
Both divide by the reading rate in the document's settings, which defaults to 150 words per minute. A rate below 30 is treated as 30, and anything that is not a plain number falls back to 150. The same rules run on the server, so the status bar and an exported cue sheet agree.
The session counter
Between the counts and the goal sits session +740: the difference between the current word count and the count when this document opened in this tab. Cut a scene and it reads session -1200, a perfectly respectable morning. It disappears at zero and resets when you reload.
Setting a daily goal
The status bar carries a Set daily goal button. Click it and type a number: the button becomes Goal 1000 and a progress bar appears beside it reading 740/1000 (74%).
- Digits only. Type
1500. A comma truncates the number, so "1,500" is read as 1. - To clear it, click the button again and leave the box empty, or type 0.
- Progress never goes below 0 or above 100%. Deleting more than you wrote shows 0.
The goal belongs to the document, so each manuscript carries its own number and it is there on another machine. There is no project-wide or account-wide goal.
On a document somebody shared with you, the goal will not stick. Only the owner's settings are stored, so it works for the rest of the sitting and is gone when you come back. Part VII covers what a share lets you change.
What "today" means
The goal measures today rather than the life of the manuscript, so it needs a baseline: the word count at the start of the day. Skarvia writes that baseline the first time the document reports its counts after you open it, and keeps it in this browser, keyed to this document and your local calendar date. Two consequences follow:
- Progress is per browser. Four hundred words on the laptop and six hundred on the desktop are two bars reading 400 and 600, not one reading 1,000.
- Clearing your browser's site data clears today's baseline. The goal itself survives, because it lives in the document.
If you leave the document open past midnight, the bar reads 0 and stays there. The new day has no baseline, and one is not written into an already-open tab. Reload, and it counts from that moment.
Counts per chapter
The manuscript total is rarely the number you want when you are deciding whether chapter nine is bloated. Two places break it down.
- The navigator, down the left of the editor, puts a word count beside each heading or detected chapter, abbreviated over a thousand (4.2k). A chapter owns everything from its line to the next chapter, so scene-break sub-entries do not split it. Chapter 11 covers the navigator.
- The binder, on the project page, shows 12 documents · 94,102 words under Draft, and a chip per detected chapter inside each document.
The binder counts the plain text of the last save rather than what is on screen now, so it can trail the editor by a save. It is a shelf view, not a live one.
The count that costs you something
Word count is also the meter on the fact-checker. A check covers 10,000 words, and a longer document consumes more than one, rounded up: a 92,000-word novel is ten checks. If you have too few left, the refusal says so, adding "This document is long, so it counts as 10 checks". Part IX covers allowances.
Here the rule differs from the status bar in your favour. The checker is metered on the accepted text, with suggested deletions resolved away, so a draft carrying a heavy round of tracked cuts is charged for the words that survive.
Skarvia also caps a single document near 66,000 words, and an import above it is refused rather than silently truncated. The fix is the one a book wants anyway: import each chapter into its own document and group them in the project.
When a number looks wrong
| What you see | What is happening |
|---|---|
| The goal bar sits at 0 all morning | The tab was open when the date changed, or this is a document you do not own. Reload. |
| The goal reads Goal 1 | A comma was typed in the number. Set it again with digits only. |
| The page count jumped and the text did not, or two page figures disagree | Different currencies, all labelled. See Three kinds of page. |
| The binder total is lower than the editor | The binder reads the last save. It catches up on its own. |
None of these numbers change a word of your manuscript. The only one that decides anything is the word count under a check, and that one is metered on the text that will survive.
Updated 2026-08-20 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?