Documentation Gone Wild

Most writers call anything over 150,000 words an epic novel. Right now, I call it a software help library.

(Intrepid souls can go here to see it.)

One of the things I do is write help/support libraries for software. I use this documentation development software called Flare, which is essentially the half-sibling of RoboHelp. Flare lets you compose help resources of just about any size and export them to a variety of formats. In my case, that’s XHTML on a web site.

A word count on a project of that nature is not a conventional tool available in that sort of software. We just kept writing until we felt we were done for a given release. Little did I know how much we actually had written.

I downloaded a trial of Analyzer, Flare’s companion application for doing all sorts of quality control checks on your documentation. I didn’t have time to play with it much since it took two hours to complete the analysis of the help library. In the end, all I needed to see was the Statistics panel.

Total word count: 161,029

I think the actual number is a bit lower because it appears to have included a few sections I excluded from the final, compiled version. Still, the true word count has to be over 150,000.

In comparison, according to what I think are the statistics from Scholastic…

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’s total word count: 168,923

Excuse me while I go ice my hands.