Hello, I’m a (fifth time) NaNoWriMo participant and have used Scrivener for each of my NaNo attempts. Really love the software and wouldn’t want to switch. However, this year it’s all just a little more tricky. I was a Mac user since 2009. However, in summer, my MacBook gave up the ghost for seemingly no reason and I, underwhelmed by Apple’s new models as well as their customer service, decided to buy a Dell laptop with Ubuntu instead. Which of course meant trying to get Scrivener to run in Linux. I’ve been doing okay with the beta (Camp NaNo version, I think) so far, but now I’ve got a problem. Last night I reached my 50k and wanted to validate my project. According to the template description, there should be a preset called “NaNoWriMo (Obfuscated)” included. However, that does not seem to be the case on my system. Is it missing on Linux? Or is something broken? Or have I made a mistake somewhere (as I said, new to Scrivener on Linux)? I tried to download the preset file from the website, but there only seems to be a Windows and Mac version. Can I use either of them? Or how else can I compile my project in a way that will give me a realistic word count?
Thanks a lot for your help!
You can just compile your draft to a text file and then run a Regular Expression on it using Gedit (or anything that supports RegEx) and replace all the characters in each word with X. Same number of words, just the letter all changed to X. Simply copy that into the validator 
Thank you. To be honest, I’m not stressed at all about obfuscation (as far as I know, I didn’t bother the last times and so far, none of my novels have ended up in the hands of the Illuminati or Chinese hist fic piracy gangs). The main reason I wanted to use the template is that it, if I understand correctly, excludes certain kinds of metadata to prevent inflated word counts. Is there a way to achieve that without using the template?
That’s pretty easy (once you know how). Select “Original” from the Format As drop-down list. That will only include the text in each document from your Manuscript folder.
If you want to re-create the scrambled text output, then go to the Replacements tab and add a few lines that replace A with X, B with X, C with X and so-forth. The NaNo word validator is just looking for contiguous strings of characters, so you could replace all letters with X and the word-count would come out the same.
You might also want to throw in a dash, replacing it with a space, and likewise an em-dash. NaNo counts hyphenated words, and any words connected by an em-dash as a single word, whereas Scrivener counts them as 2.
Wonderful, that’s just what I need. Thanks a lot.
From my point of view, this can be marked as “solved”. I’m really glad I got help so quickly.
For future reference, grab the NaNoWriMO project template from here:
https://literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo.php
And then follow the Windows instructions to import the special NaNoWriMo novel template and the NaNoWriMo compile template. Then when it comes to compile time, if you select NaNoWriMo Novel (Obfuscated) as the compile preset, it’ll automatically do all of those text substitutions making the final file unreadable. It’s super simple and very handy.
Just to be clear, there is no Obfuscated compile option for Mac, just on Windows?
Ahem! This thread:
Mr X