Wikipedia

Code 32, the "space" character, denotes the space between words, as produced by the space-bar of a keyboard. Codes 33 to 126, known as the printable characters, represent letters, digits, punctuation marks, and a few miscellaneous symbols.

Formatting, such as bold, underline, italics, text boxes and printer instructions are not included in the ASCII character definition.

According to A Standard Unit of Measure for Transcribed Reports, a white paper co-authored by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and Medical Transcription Industry Alliance (MTIA) Joint Task Force on Standards Development, the limitations of this method are:

Because spaces and tabs are included in this definition, it is not easy to count a document with the naked eye.

The fallacy of this statement lies in the reality that it's highly unlikely any facility is actually going to verify billing by manually counting visible characters. Most don't have the resources to verify billing using available software and there are programmable methods to detect hidden codes and characters.

This method compensates for most of the keyboarding required to produce a completed document. It is not a "keystroke" method, however.

How can this method be manipulated?

This method is only in a separate section because in the white paper, ASCII characters were most comparable to the visible black character.

In that regard, ASCII characters can be manipulated the same as any other character. For a complete discussion, see Characters.

Bottom line: ASCII characters are just as verifiable as visible black characters. This method compensates for more of the keystrokes required to format the final output; however, it doesn't include all the formatting. If you don't know how to make formatting characters visible for purposes of verification, this method would be better than a character count that includes format codes. (See Characters for a complete discussion.)

If you use this or one of the character count methods and don't have a method for making invisible characters visible, please feel free to contact ACT for consulting services.