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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label wordcount</title>
</head><body>
<h3>How many words have you written?</h3>
<p/>One often has to submit a document (e.g., a paper or a dissertation)
under some sort of constraint about its size. Sensible people set a
constraint in terms of numbers of pages, but there are some that
persist in limiting the numbers of words you type.
<p/>A simple solution to the requirement can be achieved following a
simple observation: the powers that be are unlikely to count all the
words of a document submitted to them. Therefore, a statistical
method can be employed: find how many words there are on a full page;
find how many full pages there are in the document (allowing for
displays of various sorts, this number will probably not be an
integer); multiply the two. However, if the document to be submitted
is to determine the success of the rest of one’s life, it takes a
brave person to thumb their nose at authority quite so
comprehensively...
<p/>The simplest method is to strip out the (La)TeX markup, and to count
what’s left. On a Unix-like system, this may be done using
<i>detex</i> and the built-in <i>wc</i>:
<pre>
detex <filename> | wc -w
</pre>
The <i>latexcount</i> script does the same sort of job, in one
“step”; being a <i>perl</i> script, it is in principle rather
easily configured (see documentation inside the script).
<i>Winedt</i> (see <a href="FAQ-editors.html">editors and shells</a>)
provides this functionality direct in the Windows environment.
<p/>Simply stripping (La)TeX markup isn’t entirely reliable, however:
that markup itself may contribute typeset words, and this could be a
problem. The <i>wordcount</i> package
contains a Bourne shell (i.e., typically Unix) script for running a
LaTeX file with a special piece of supporting TeX code, and then
counting word indications in the log file. This is probably as
accurate automatic counting as you can get.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>detex</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/detex.zip">support/detex</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/detex.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/detex/">browse</a>)
<dt><tt><i>wordcount</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/wordcount.zip">macros/latex/contrib/wordcount</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/wordcount.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/wordcount/">browse</a>)
</dl>
<p/>
<p/><p/><p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=wordcount">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=wordcount</a>
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