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"Show word count" is not quite useful for Chinese and Japanese #700

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@Explorer09

The "Show word count" is not quite useful is not quite useful in languages such as Chinese and Japanese, where ASCII spaces (U+0020) are seldom used in delimiting words. It might be useful for Korean, but I can't say that for sure as I don't use Korean regularly in my life (I'm from Taiwan, by the way).

In Chinese the words are not delimited in spaces. In most Chinese writing, we are more interested in character counts rather than word counts.

Japanese seldom delimits words in spaces, but when it does, certain characters might be used in place of spaces. The most common are U+3000 (Ideographic Space) and U+30FB (Katakana Middle Dot).

The above are the overall usability issues with the word count feature. The technical issues are as follows:

  • It does not recognize Unicode whitespaces other than ASCII spaces and newlines. U+3000 is a Unicode whitespace.
  • The Chinese translation of the feature is inaccurate (Wrong: 顯示字數; Correct: 顯示英語單詞數)
  • The word count is inaccurate even when multiple languages are mixed together in a text.

Test text:

ブレス・オフ・ザ・ワイルド(U+30FB_KatakanaMiddleDot)
ブレス オフ ザ ワイルド(U+3000_IdeographicSpace)
브레스 오브 더 와일드

Actual result: 6
Expected result: I don't know, maybe 9

20231029_161246
(Screenshot taken with Simple Notes 6.17.0)

Activity

  1. Aga-C commented on Oct 29, 2023

    @Aga-C
    Contributor

    It's a duplicate of #357.

  2. Explorer09 commented on Oct 29, 2023

    @Explorer09
    Author

    @Aga-C Not quite a duplicate. There are multiple issues in my report. Besides, mine focuses on the usability of the whole feature.

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