Gratz Mattias! I have looked at this problem and agree whole heartedly with your basic fix. I was preparing to patch something similar :-) I am *very* glad to see this basic feature addition get in this week. As to the question of (some!?) docs not showing the correct count upon open - I had noticed that but was not able to reproduce it reliably. I too am new to the LibreOffice code base and the question of where the word count is done in the background is not blindingly obvious. Also, one of the OpenOffice issue threads (i#100629) mentions the regression you saw in your testing versus 3.2. I think there are a couple of issues involved in the inaccuracies reported by you and at OOo. What you see where the count changes after touching the document looks like a count init or background counting problem. I think this problem could be due to changes made in Libre Office related to timer fixes. If it is a timer related problem it may become more obvious with larger test docs. The SwScanner did have issues with leading spaces (used to give an extra word) and I am pretty sure that is why the length test (aScanner.GetLen() > 1) was placed there. I think leading spaces were counted as a word because an initial empty string was returned by the scanner. I am not sure if it is necessary any more given that the scanner now internally skips leading white space and returns false if the string is empty. Every time I tried to clean up the code around the scanner the count went way off. My take is that the scanner is not working well or it would not need the crutch code. The SwScanner appears to be intended for a different purpose (comments talk about scripts alot) and it called in only one other place. It is working way too hard to produce a simple count. The OOo counting mechanism had pre-existing problems with word count (i#89042 and i#100629) related to leading quotation marks and special characters. The quoted string "word" is counted as 2 words. AFAICT hidden paragraphs (redlines?) and notes are not counted. This counting mechanism has always counted isolated punctuation as a word. Nice hack, LeMoyne JLCastle -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/PATCH-Fix-for-bug-feature-request-30550-Character-count-without-spaces-tp1778667p1780938.html Sent from the Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.