What's My Line?

If You Are Old Enough, You Will Remember That One
by Ralph and Carol Bass

We had a client call the other day and say “I counted my lines using MS Word and your line count is much larger than that one. Why is that?” That is a very good question. Just how many ways are there to count lines? Let’s see:

1) Do you count the header and/or footer or not?
2) How about the footnotes and endnotes, are they counted?
3) Do you count lines? How long is a line? Is it a gross line or a net line?
4) Do you take into account font size and character spacing?
5) Do you count words? How long is a word?
6) Do you count characters? Which characters?
7) What about the shift key and special character?
8) How about spaces, do they count?
9) Or do you charge and count by the page? How much is on a page?
10) What about the invisible formatting characters?
11) What about underlining?
12) Capitals?
13) Italics
14) Tab Key
15) Do you charge by the minute of dictation?
16) Or do you skip all that and just pay for the time it took to transcribe?

Things to consider:

· In MS Word and some line counting utilities, the characters in headers and graphics are not counted.
· There is no standard industry line although 65 characters is the most widely used and accepted number. This is based on the old Courier font which was 65 characters between 1" right and left margins.
· Counting only the characters you can see—the "black characters" means you must charge a higher rate. Why? Because this “black character” rate must take into count all the character that are typed but not seen by the end user. However, because this rate is higher than the rate for characters + spaces + formatting, etc, it has the disadvantage of being simply higher in the sight of the end user. Because the “black character” rate appears higher than the method that counts the unseen characters, it is difficult to compete in the market. People simply go with what appears to be the lower rate.
· A gross line means that if there is anything on a line then that counts as a line. You will often find more lists in the transcripts of typists who understand that they are getting paid by the gross line method—because even one word is a line.
· A net line is generally the total characters in the document divided by 65—the number of characters that make up a normal line.
· A small font will pack a line or a page and a large font will spread out to multiple lines or pages. These can be a means of deceiving the client or a means of cheating the transcription service—depending on who is doing it.
· A word, like a line, must be defined. Is it the old standard of 5 keystrokes including spaces or an actual word like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?

In our case we charge for every key stroke by the typist, which includes spaces (try reading the page without the spaces), capitals, italics, underlining, everything. Why? Because that is what transcription is all about—typing. We don’t charge for every other keystroke because we don’t type every other keystroke, we type all of them.

Then we then divide the total keystrokes by 65. That equals the number of “net” lines that are on a page. A gross line count would count a three word line as a full line. A net line count requires a certain number of characters (often 65) before a line is generated.

“But MS Word has a different (and lower) number” says the client. At about this time you are thinking “This is going nowhere!” Are you willing to do separate bookkeeping for a client that insists that they will pay only on the MS Word count? If not, then you may lose that client. But even if you are willing to keep separate records for this one client, can you maintain your regular line charge for the MS Word total? The answer is probably no. So then you are faced with “raising” your rate to just get back to your normal rate. This is looking more and more unlikely.

How do you count your transcription?

Digital Transcription Inc
Ralph & Carol Bass
ralphebass@digitran.net
caroljbass@digitran.net
864-292-8487
www.digitran.net