Category — Software

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.

I’m a Mac person. I’m not going to wade into an operating system debate, though. That’s not my purpose here.

For those of you who use a Mac or are thinking of switching, the vast majority of people I work with are on Windows machines, but I’d only need one hand to count the number of compatibility issues I’ve had in the last five years. So, if you are looking to switch, don’t let compatibility issues worry you.

On with the list!

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