My reading time from 60+ to 40+ minutes all of a sudden without any modification of the source file

[kleinbottle]

My reading time dropped from 60+ to 40+ minutes all of a sudden without any modification of the source file.

How or why could this happen?

The raw number of words from wc on the .md file is 14137.

Is there any possibility of an arithmetic overflow?

[gandreadis]

Hi @kleinbottle, this module does not implement or provide reading time estimates. Are you sure that this is the right package/repository?

[kleinbottle]

Hi @kleinbottle, this module does not implement or provide reading time estimates. Are you sure that this is the right package/repository?

I use it to estimate reading time by a simple division of word count by 200 for an estimate of reading time in minutes. I was getting an estimate of 60 minutes for a long blog that suddenly dropped to 40 before I finished it. That is why I filed an issue on this site.

I will double check for an error at my end, by getting actual word count, and revert. Thanks.

[kleinbottle]

mwc content/blogs/varieties-of-multiplication/varieties-of-multiplication.md

7927

pandoc --lua-filter wordcount.lua content/blogs/varieties-of-multiplication/varieties-of-multiplication.md

12173 words in body
61031 characters in body
73285 characters in body (including spaces)

These were the results the blog in question.

For all other blogs, the two methods are close enough to not merit mention.

Thanks.

[gandreadis]

Thanks for the clarification. If I understand this correctly, there is a discrepancy between the wordcount of this repository’s tool and another word counting tool. I cannot verify or test what could be the cause of this, as I do not have access to the text in question. It could be due to a variety of factors, such as special characters/constructs/… If you can share the source text that you are counting, maybe I can see what could be causing the discrepancy. To be clear: I do not think that there is any chance of an arithmetic overflow, with these low numbers.

[kleinbottle]

Sorry for the delayed response but I was not monitoring this thread, although I thought I was.

If you can share the source text that you are counting, maybe I can see what could be causing the discrepancy.

The displayed HTML of the blog is here.

Please note that the reading time dropped from 60 to 40 minutes, after I augmented the text.

The source file proper is a markdown file:
varieties-of-multiplication.md

NB: Reading time was computed locally as 200 * word-count, IIRC. If the word count you now get with the source is OK, I suggest letting the matter rest there. Thanks.

[gandreadis]

Hi @kleinbottle, due to limited time, I cannot debug this further, unfortunately. If you have narrowed this down to a specific paragraph of text / set of special characters, though, please let me know and I will see if I can fix it.