If you're editing by hand then length prefixes are also broken easily and counting the length of strings is cumbersome unless you're using a "technical" text ed

If you're editing by hand then length prefixes are also broken easily and counting the length of strings is cumbersome unless you're using a "technical" text editor like VS Code in which case its just as easy to write a delimiter like \x1F (unit separator) as it is to highlight the text and look at character count. Unless "editing by hand" means using something like excel?