Wordcount and highlighting glitch in Writer 2.4?

[tbone762]

I recently upgraded to 2.4, running on XP, and since then I've noticed a glitch in the word count in Writer, which is that it seems to give inaccurate results depending on whether I highlight part, or all of the main body text (so as not to count the footnotes and title). Does anyone know of any common mistakes with the word count that I might be making? Or is this a genuine glitch? At this rate, I'm going to have to transfer these to MS Word before putting the official counts on, because it has a word count I can trust.

It may or may not be related, but since the upgrade, I've been getting an occasional highlighting glitch as well, where the program behaves as if the shift key is stuck down (for highlighting purposes). In other words, wherever I click on the document it highlights that text instead of just moving the cursor there. Also when I use the cursor keys to move around it selects text as if I'm holding the shift key. I've tried actually holding the key in the hope that it will 'reset' it, but the only way to fix the glitch is to close the document and open it again. At first these glitches were happening at the same time, but they have now happened independently as well.

Anyone got any ideas on either of those?

[Phil]

Hi and welcome to the community!

I am not quite clear in how far the word count results are inaccurate. What do you compare them to?
Maybe this thread can help?

In the discussion in issue 17964 (start reading comments from 2005 on), it is reported that problems occur with mixed Asian-Latin text. Could this apply to your problem?

Concerning the highlighting glitch, I was not able to reproduce it with OOo 2.4.0 on Win XP Pro.
So maybe there is really some connection between the two problems?

Does the highlighting glitch only occur in OpenOffice or maybe also in other applications?

You could try to install version 2.3.1 to see if it is really a new behavior in 2.4.0.
If you don't want to downgrade, you may run both versions in parallel.
You'll find information on that in the OOo Wiki article Run OOo versions parallel

KR, phil