Re: counting the words in a TeX document

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Sat, 5 Aug 2006, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> I would like to ask how difficult it would be to count the number of
> words in a TeX/ConTeXt document. If it's too complex, please ignore
> the rest of the message.
>
>
> Most recipes for LaTeX say that it's best to do something like
> "pdftotext" and then issue "wc" to count the words in the resulting
> text file, but windows users don't have "wc" and sometimes you only
> need to know the length of the abstract or so ...
>
> Some time ago Hans mentioned that he counts the number of appearance
> of single charactres, but I don't know how difficult it would be to
> extend it to count the number of words.
>
> The problem is not that well defined (how to handle equations, some
> would probably want to exclude headers, footers, buttons, ...), but it
> only needs to be an approximation and "backward compatibility" (in the
> sense that counter would have to result in the same number after some
> years) is not needed at all since algorithms might improve with time
> and the resulting document doesn't really depend on that number, it
> would only be written to the log file.
>
> My idea for the interface would be something like
>
> \startwordcount[abstract]
> \startframedtext
> Bla bla.
> \stopframedtext
> \stopwordcount
>
> which would write something like "abstract: 2 words" to the log file
>
> or
>
> \startstatistics[abstract][words]
> \startframedtext
> Bla bla.
> \stopframedtext
> \stopstatistics
>
> But this is really a low priority. I'm currently using Acrobat to copy
> the text, then I paste it into Office and take a look at statistics
> there when I need to obey some limitations.
>
> So, if there's a simple solution, I would be glad to use it, but if it
> takes too much time to implement it, it's probably not worth the
> effort.

A very crude approach. There is a program called detex 
http://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/detex/ I have not used it, but I 
think that it strips off every command \something from the tex file. 
Then you can filter the file through wc to get a rough estimate of 
the number of words. One approach that will work is

\startstatistics[filename][words|letters|lines]

maps to

\startbuffer[\jobname-statistics-filename]

and

\stopstatistics maps to

\stopbuffer
\getbuffer[\jobname-statistics-filename]
\executesystemcommand{detex \jobname-statistics-filename.tmp | wc 
<flags correspondingto words|lines|letters> }

and possibly prettify output to be more clearly visible in the log.

Another approach can be write a vim script so that you can count the 
number of words in a visually highlighted area.

Aditya