Are there any disadvantages of using a spacebar counter as opposed to other methods of counting characters or words

Are There Any Disadvantages Of Using A spacebar counter As Opposed To Other Methods Of Counting Characters Or Words?

The use of a spacebar counter to measure the amount of characters or words in a text is an extremely useful tool when writing papers or documents. A spacebar counter can easily count up the total number of characters or words in a text, providing one with a basic idea of the size of the paper. This tool is quick to use, as all one has to do is cop and paste their text into the appropriate field and usually within seconds they have their total character/word count.

However, as convenient as this tool is for those who don't have time to manually count out each character or word, there are some disadvantages to using a spacebar counter. Firstly, it does not account for punctuation when calculating total character/word counts. For example, the phrase "Hi there. How are you?" would be measured as nine characters on a spacebar counter whereas it actually contains eleven characters when punctuation is included. Furthermore, while most spacebar counters account for spaces between words these types of counters do not consider differences between proper nouns (e.g., Hillary Clinton) and everyday language (e.g., she). Thus, one cannot ascertain the exact number of words without utilizing other methods of counting.

Secondly, while spacebar counters are extremely accurate they may lead to confusion on larger works such as books or research papers because most writers prefer to find out how many pages their text will take up based on how many characters/words is in each page rather than simply finding out how many characters/words are in total texts that are at least one hundred pages long (as determined by an editor).