[Mister L]

Originally Posted by KevinH

There is a Sigil, Plugin called "Regex Function Replace", that should be able to count either characters or words of just text and even set the spans with incremented labels and ids with the right python function block.

That may be the easiest way to do what you want.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

There's a dedicated tool for this task that you might find helpful. Print Page Approximator for EPUB and EPUB3
(The author is an MR member.)
If you happen to have a Kindle, the Calibre KFX output plugin also supports auto-generated page numbers.

Excellent, thank you so much to both of you, this is far beyond what I was hoping for I will take a look at both of those options.