Re: counting the words in a TeX document

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2006, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Base on those three answers I got a more clear idea of two (different,
> but complementary) methods that might be sensible:
>
> a) ctxtools --wordcount filename[tex|pdf]
> to do the wordcount for the whole document using pdftotext + ruby regexp
>
> b)
> \usemodule[wordcount]
>
> whatever
>
> \startstatistics[name][words|letters|lines]
> some more-or-less plain text
> \stopstatistics
>
> whatever
>
> and according to Aditya's idea, run a (ruby) regular expression
> (insead of detex) on it which would write the nicely formatted desired
> number to the output/log file. (I don't know if it's possible to use
> the first approach for the second problem, but it doesn't make sense
> to complicate things too much.)

If you have a script that counts words in a Context document, the 
second approach is straight forward. Write everything to a buffer and 
run the script on the buffer. However, such a mechansim will never be 
perfect (or close to perfect) in the sense of parsing arbitrary input.

ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/plain/contrib/misc/xii.tex

But of course, you will not write anything like this in an abstract 
:-)

Aditya