CJK Academic Count

中文 | 日本語 | 한국어

CJK Academic Count is an Obsidian plugin for academic character counting in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean humanities writing.

It is designed as a supplement to Obsidian's built-in word and character count. The plugin focuses on the traditional East Asian academic sense of "text length": the amount of CJK writing itself, not punctuation, numbers, Latin words, or whitespace.

Features

• Shows the whole-note academic character count in the status bar.
• Shows the selected-text academic character count when text is selected.
• Counts academic characters as: Han characters + Hiragana + Katakana + Hangul.
• Excludes punctuation, numbers, Latin letters, and whitespace from the main status-bar metric.
• Shows reference metrics in the tooltip, including characters with and without whitespace, a Word-like count, punctuation, numbers, Latin text, and other characters.
• Ignores YAML frontmatter and common Markdown markup by default for a preview-like count.
• Localizes the status bar, tooltip, and settings UI in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean by following Obsidian's language setting when available.

Counting Rules

The main metric is academic characters.

It includes:

• Han characters used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text
• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Hangul

It excludes:

• Punctuation
• Numbers
• Latin letters and Latin words
• Whitespace
• Markdown syntax, if the default cleanup option is enabled

The plugin counts Unicode grapheme clusters rather than raw UTF-16 code units. This avoids splitting combined characters, such as Japanese kana with combining marks.

Reference Metrics

Hover over the status-bar item to see extra metrics:

• Characters without whitespace: similar to Microsoft Word's character count without spaces.
• Characters with whitespace: includes horizontal spaces such as regular spaces, full-width spaces, and tabs. Line breaks are not counted as characters.
• Word-like count: counts academic characters one by one, and counts Latin or numeric runs as word tokens.

These reference metrics are intentionally secondary. The status bar keeps the focus on the academic CJK count.

Installation

Until the plugin is published in the Obsidian community plugin directory:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest GitHub release.
2. In your vault, create .obsidian/plugins/cjk-academic-count/.
3. Put those three files in that folder.
4. Restart Obsidian.
5. Enable CJK Academic Count in Settings -> Community plugins.

Acknowledgements

This plugin was inspired in part by CJK Count. CJK Count focuses on counting CJK characters; CJK Academic Count narrows the purpose toward East Asian humanities writing and adds selected-text counting plus academic-count-oriented reference metrics.