On Fri, 22 May 2020 16:55:41 +0100, Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson
at port.ac.uk (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote to Freelance
Traveller:

>100-200 words?!  Nice and vague.

Well, the way MS Word counts words, and the way typing tests compute
words-per-minute, use radically different definitions of "word". Since no
one definition of "word" is necessarily satisfactory for all usages, any
estimate of word count is going to have to be vague.

I figured that the typical word was between five and ten characters
(letters) in length; 200 words at 5 characters is 1K; 100 words at 10
characters is 1K. Assuming completely raw/unformatted text...

Formatted documents - whether Word, Wordperfect, RTF, HTML, etc., have some
overhead for the formatting, so you need to figure the low end for word
count. The less overhead a format has, the higher your words-per-kilobyte
will be, but the less 'fancy stuff' you can do. Markdown/CommonMark format,
for example, has very little overhead, and so will come in closer to 200
WPK, but limits formatting to essentially headers, bold/italic/both,
numbered/bulleted lists, and fixed/variable pitch. Word processor formats
and PDF have high overhead, and thus come in closer to 100 WPK, but allow a
lot more control over the appearance of the text.

It starts getting even more complicated when you ship compressed files
around; different formats have different compression limits, and those are
more tied to _how_the_overhead_is_implemented_ rather than _how_much_
overhead there is. Formats that are implementable in pure ASCII or the
lower half of ISO-8859 will typically compress at about 16:1; some
word-processor formats, like OpenOffice, may compress very little or not at
all because they're already compressed.

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