Nisus Writer Pro - Manual (Page 482)

462 Glossary of Useful Terms
by the following steps:
1. Nisus Writer Pro counts the words in the entire document. Contractions,
hyphenated words and numbers (such as dates and dollar amounts, etc.) are each
counted as one word.
2. Nisus Writer Pro then computes the average sentence length, where colons,
semicolons, and newline characters are not considered to terminate/delimit a
sentence.
3. Nisus Writer Pro counts the syllables in the entire document. This syllable
counting uses a special algorithm which, although not perfect, is quite accurate
for the English language. It divides the number of syllables by the number of
words and multiplies by 100 to get the number of syllables per 100 words.
Although the syllable number in numbers and symbols should be counted as if
these were pronounced when read aloud (i.e. 1991—nineteen ninety one = 2, 2, 1
syllables) this is not done in Nisus Writer Pro at this time.
4. Nisus Writer Pro multiplies the average number of syllables per word multiplied
by 84.6. The result is the Reading Ease Score. The scale ranges from 0 to 100. The
higher the score, the easier it is to read.
The formulas:
Flesch:
206.835 - (1.015 * averageWordsPerSentence) - (84.6 * averageSyllablesPerWord)
FleschKincaid:
(0.39 * averageWordsPerSentence) + (11.8 * averageSyllablesPerWord) - 15.59
FOG Index scores
This is a “reading grade level” score. It is calculated by determining the average
sentence length plus the percentage of long words. All of this multiplied by 0.4. A
long word is one with more than two syllables.
Its formula is:
F=((avg. # of words per sentence)+100*(long words per words))*.4
font or typeface
According to the Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font>, “a typeface is a
coordinated set of glyphs designed with stylistic unity. A typeface usually
comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks; it may also
include ideograms and symbols, or consist entirely of them, for example,
mathematical or map-making symbols. The term typeface is often conflated with
font, a term which, historically, had a number of distinct meanings before the
advent of desktop publishing; these terms are now effectively synonymous when
discussing digital typography. A helpful and still valid distinction between font
and typeface is a font's status as a discrete commodity with legal restrictions,
while typeface designates a visual appearance or style not immediately reducible
to any one foundry's production or proprietary control.”
glyph
The shape of the basic unit in any written language. These include letters,
numerals, punctuation marks, as well as Chinese and Japanese characters.
grapheme
The basic unit in any written language
gremlin
Loosely “gremlins” are any non-printing characters that serve no useful purpose.
Currently Nisus Writer Pro defines the following code points as gremlins:
U+0000 to U+0008 ASCII Null to Backspace
U+000B Vertical Tab
U+0014 to U+0017 ASCII Shift Out to Unit Separator
U+0082 to U+0083 ASCII Break Permitted and Negation
U+0086 to U+009F ASCII Start Of Selected Area to Application Program Command
U+E000 to U+F700 Private use area, which is technically from E000–F8FF
Apple has assignments starting at F700
GREP
GREP is an acronym which means “search globally for lines matching the regular
expression, and print them”. The important part here is “regular expression”.
Using GREP you can search for “text patterns” (regular expressions: series of
numbers, or series of letters, etc.). Nisus Writer Pro uses a variant of GREP and
makes it available to its users in a menu-driven from that use human language
and visual cues.