My wife translates subtitles for tv programs in Brazil. She currently uses 
Winword but now plans to swap to OOoWriter in her new laptop, but we've noticed 
that OOoWriter does not count characters per line in the status bar, as Winword 
does. She needs this features because tv subtitles are limited to 32 characters 
(with spaces) per line. Is there a way to make the status bar show characters 
per line in OOoWriter?

Also, both of these programs measure lines by linear length, and there's a good 
reason for that, of course. But could there be a plugin that would count 
characters per line and produce a behaviour when a certain limit is reached? 
For instance, in my wife's case, every time she types in 32 characters, there 
could be a visual warning, or the cursor could insert a line break and move 
down to the line below.