@chaley,
I was expecting you to save this for a rainy day. Should've known better
I have no objection at all to leading spaces. Your proposal is certainly more useful than a long list of individual Page counts.
A few thoughts:
- Are you thinking that this may become a general feature for any numeric field? If so, many people use the Count Pages plugin to generate both Page count and Word count (not me for the latter). Word counts could be significantly larger numbers, at least 6-dgts maybe more. I'm not sure at which point you need to decide how many leading spaces to allow or whether it's possible to programatically calculate it per field depending on actual values in the database. If it has to be a one-size-fits-all for all fields then a large number of displayed (rather than stored) leading spaces for a field which is only ever in the range 0-999 may look a bit peculiar.
- If its a general feature, the question of what the range intervals should be will also arise. I think, on the whole people like to see 'nice round numbers' as the start (or end) points, e.g. 200-249 or 200-299 rather than 221-370. However a range interval of 50 or 100 is probably too small if the field is Word count.
- If people see and like the ability to have range groups for Pages, I can imagine future requests to have the same for Dates, e.g. Date published. There's no requirement to say 'yes', of course