Typophile

Calculating character count

mattcoyne

Hi,

I'm hoping for some help from the experts (that's you).

I'm trying to create copy guidelines (specifically max character counts) for fixed width text boxes in a Flash application.

Things I know:

• I am using one font, size, weight in a single text box
• Each text box is different, but a fixed pixel width
• Each text box is populated with dynamic text

I've been recommended TypeBook Creator to get a character count per pica (1.25), then I've read that 1 pica = 12 pixels. From that I used a couple of examples of text box widths (120px and 240px) to work out a character count (12.5 and 25). But when I mock this up in Photoshop, the total characters can be a 15% variance from that calculation.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Is there a known method to calculate the character count (max/average/range) for each text box?

Hoping someone can help.

Thanks,
Matt.

kentlew

Not sure I’m following what you’re trying to accomplish, but character count is always going to be an estimate of some average (whatever that happens to mean).

If you get a line of content with a lot of capitals or ‘m’s and ‘w’s, then your character count is going to go way down. If you have a line with lots of ‘i’s ‘l’s ‘t’s and a bunch of punctuation, then your count can go way up. A 15% variance sounds pretty likely to me, if not more.

mattcoyne

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not sure I'm making sense myself, but it's good to know that the 15% + variance is expected. I guess I was hoping for a tighter method.

kentlew

You could always specify a monospaced font. That way, character width is fixed and character count becomes very easy to calculate. That’s one of the primary advantages of a monospaced font.

You’ll still have variance based on the length of any word in proximity to the end, especially if you don’t implement any hyphenation. But it will be considerably less.

mattcoyne

Thanks again.

Unfortunately I'm not in a position to use a monospaced font.

So, if the method I'm using is relatively sound, I'll work with that and give guidelines to the client with expected variances of character counts.

There's only so much you can do, right?

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