If you work on any sort of project that has editorial content, the writer, your client, or someone involved in providing the text content is likely to ask you for a word count. For many designers, that means copy & pasting some bogus text from the design into an app like MS Word or Apple Pages to get a character, word, or paragraph count.

That’s just silly and unproductive.

Simply hit F6 or open the InDesign Info Panel manually by visiting the menubar Window>Info. Now all you need to do is click in any text box with the Text Tool active and take a look at the Info Panel.

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As you can see in the image above, you’ll be shown the character, word, line, and paragraph count in the selected text box.  In the image, I have a text box selected that contains 882 characters. The Info Panel tells me that I have 629 of those characters showing, and 253 more that are hidden because I reduced the size of the text box and the text is overset. If the text box were not reduced and all the characters showing, the Info Panel would simply say 882 characters.