I use two methods for gross line counting. see msg.
I do not have a program for counting gross lines. I have two methods for counting the lines, for two different clients. Once I have the lines counted, the Line Reporter feature of the Instant Text program does the rest. One client uses the regular hard returns between the lines of text, so in that case I cannot use the line counting menu that comes with the word processor, because that counts blank lines as well as lines with words on them. So, for this client, I have to actually count the lines with text on them by eye, by hand. This client uses Corel Word Perfect 9 word processing. The other client has a more streamlined line counting setup for her documents. These are Microsoft Word documents, but instead of having a hard return after each line, she uses the "before and after" spacing feature in Microsoft Word in her document setup. This is found under the Format Menu. Choose Format/Paragraph/Indents and Spacing tab, and then you will see the place where you can choose the before and after spacing, and anywhere from 0 points to 3 or 6 or 12 points, etc., can be chosen. The documents I use for this client have all the before and after spacing selected in advance and already set up in the templates. At the end of typing up a document, there are no hard returns anywhere in the document, thus there are no empty lines with no text on them. In other words, if there are 50 lines of text in the document, the line counter (found under Tools Menu/Word Count/then read off the Lines number) number of lines is going to read 50, whereas in my first example with the first client, a document containing 50 lines of text and 25 blank lines would give me a line counter reading of 75 lines. [This before and after feature is used not just to make the line counting easier. It is used so that the documents can be fit to a page, where necessary, and still look very professional, since the "before and after" spacing can be adjusted to look very balanced visually]. Once I get the gross line count for the document, I enter that line count into my records using the Line Reporter feature of Instant Text. So, I would choose the Document Statistics (you can get to this by pointing the cursor at the grey area of the Phrase Advisory bar, and right click, and select Document Statistics from the quick menu) in the IT program, enter "50" as the gross line count for that document, and then hit the "log" command to log the entry. The Line Reporter then records the name of the document, the date and time, the typist, the client, the cost per line (my line rate) for that work, and whatever other details I have chosen in the Line Reporter to be recorded for that document. The only data I have to enter myself is the gross line count for that document, and the Line Reporter records the rest automatically according to the settings I have put in place. At the end of the billing cycle, the Line Reporter helps me produce an invoice which lists out all the documents, their line counts, the cost, and so forth all in summary form. For the first client, the one with the many blank lines in the documents that come from using the hard returns, there is a way to extract those "paragraph marks" out of the document for counting purposes in Microsoft Word. You use the Find and Replace feature and select the paragraph marks (this is basically a command to find all ^^ and replace all with ^) and remove them from the document. I could describe those steps for you if you need it. It is not difficult to do with Microsoft Word. I am sure a macro could be written too, to make those steps faster. I do not know how to do this task with Corel WordPerfect though, and I find it just as quick to just count the lines by eye instead, for the WordPerfect client. Patty A.
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