At a guess, it will have taken the average words per line, and multiplied by lines with content which would be reasonable accurate but would skew as the numbers get larger. Using antiword(doc to txt, I presume there is something similar for odt) and wc should be a little less involved if you need more accuracy (thou im only assuming wc is accurate)

Sounds like OpenOffice needs a more sensible word count algorithm. With difficulty I think? Maybe there is a feature to do it in OpenOffice somewhere. I LaTeXed a book at some point and it annoyed me that all the quotation marks were "..."" rather than `` ... '' in the source. I am not expert enough with any standard Unix tools that might be easy to do this with, so I ended up writing a quick program that tracked the number of " characters read and output `` and '' as appropriate. On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 7:07 PM, Chakat Sandwalker <sandwalker(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I've found the problem.  It seems that 'curly' double quote marks and apostrophes, as opposed to the plain ones, are counted as words.  Once I'd converted them all to plain marks the word count went down to only 19 above NaNoWriMo's word count.  That's far more acceptable.  However, converting them /back/ to smart quotes is going to be a pain; apostrophes are easy, but how does one convert the double quotes back when different sets are used for opening and closing?  Any ideas?

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