Configuring Character and Word Counts

CUE can display a character / word count below story elements or fields in story elements:

The counts are constantly updated as the user types, so they are always correct. The counts are only displayed where they are configured to appear.

To add a count to a story element you need to add a ui:count element to the story element's type definition. The ui:count element must be inserted as the child of the story-element-type element:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<story-element-type
  xmlns="http://xmlns.escenic.com/2008/content-type"
  xmlns:ui="http://xmlns.escenic.com/2008/interface-hints" name="headline">
    <ui:label>Headline</ui:label>
    <ui:icon>headline</ui:icon>
    <ui:priority>900</ui:priority>
    <ui:count show="true" for="total headlines"/>
    <field name="headline" type="basic" mime-type="text/plain">
        <ui:title-field/>
    </field>
    <ui:style>
      .story-element-headline [contenteditable='true'] {
        font-size: 2.5em;
      }
    </ui:style>
</story-element-type>

The show="true" attribute causes counts to be displayed below story elements of this type. If you set show=false, then the characters and words are counted, but not displayed below the story elements. The for="total headlines" attribute causes the counts to be added to storyline summaries that can be displayed on a Metrics metadata panel:

Specifically, for="total headlines" says that the counts are to be added to summaries called total and headlines. For information about how storyline count summaries are defined, see Configuring a Metrics Panel.

When you add a count to a story element type in this way, all of the text in the story element is counted: all of its text fields, and any child story elements it contains. For some story element types, you may not want to do this. For an image story element type, for example, you might want to count the content of the caption field, but not the content of the copyright field. In this case, instead of adding a ui:count element to the whole story-element-type definition, you can just insert it to the field definitions you are interested in:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<story-element-type xmlns="http://xmlns.escenic.com/2008/content-type"
                    xmlns:ui="http://xmlns.escenic.com/2008/interface-hints"
                    name="image">
  ...
  <field name="caption" type="basic" mime-type="text/plain">
    <ui:label>Caption</ui:label>
    <ui:count show="true" for="total body"/>
  </field>
  ...
</story-element-type>