We are using OCS for a conference (supported through the Dalhousie library). The system is giving an abstract word limit error message, yet the abstracts submitted are not over the word limit. This has happened to multiple presenters, & I was able to replicate the error. When I entered 149 words, it saved fine. I entered 150 and it gave an error message, even though the limit is currently set to 150. Even raising the abstract word limit setting to 151 words (or even 160 words) in the set up didn’t seem to fix it. Thoughts?
Hi @bwuetherick,
The abstract field permits HTML elements (for italics etc, using a TinyMCE input control), and in order to calculate the number of words, OCS first removes all the HTML, then counts the number of spaces in the resulting text. This means that the word count will be approximate if the user is entering content that involves HTML. There are a few options that might help…
- Remove the word limit enforcement from the conference track setup; document the limits in e.g. your submission checklist, and enforce it manually
- Increase the word count in your settings by a margin of say 10% to give some wiggle room for HTML content
- If Dalhousie has the resources, alter the software to improve the counting mechanism (we would welcome a code contribution around this)
Off the top of my head it might be useful to look at a tool like https://www.tinymce.com/docs/plugins/wordcount/ – unfortunately we’re fairly busy with OJS 3.x at the moment, so OCS is a little neglected.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Would people cutting and pasting from Word be the issue (with Word adding weird code)? I suspect that is what people are doing. I will adjust all of the settings and see what happens!
Hi @bwuetherick,
That’s possible – if I recall correctly, Word does generate some pretty wonky HTML. If you have a sample of what someone is using, you can click the “Code” button in the TinyMCE input to look at what code is passing around behind the scenes.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team