<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Hi,<br>
<br>
On 2012-03-13 18:22, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:heck.johannes@googlemail.com">heck.johannes@googlemail.com</a> wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:8547BB8E2B8F4F93A17C500D109CF534@JohannesPC"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div style="font-family: 'Calibri'; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);
font-size: 12pt;">
I’ve just been looking for a possibility to count characters
in latex documents.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
I assume we're talking about some form of "relevant" words in the
document (i.e., not the number of characters in an arbitrary text
file which happens to have a .tex extension).<br>
<br>
This has been suggested a while ago
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://code.google.com/p/texworks/issues/detail?id=157">http://code.google.com/p/texworks/issues/detail?id=157</a>). The
problem is that (La)TeX is a very versatile (programming) language
[1], so doing this properly (without essentially forking most of the
TeX interpreter code itself) is most likely impossible. Consider,
e.g., the simple case<br>
\newcommand{\a}{Hallo Welt}<br>
\a<br>
How would a script know about this (or more complicated constructs),
except when it properly parses the whole document.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:8547BB8E2B8F4F93A17C500D109CF534@JohannesPC"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div style="font-family: 'Calibri'; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);
font-size: 12pt;">I’ll need that for my next document, because
it’s limited to 144k Chars.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Characters of input, or of output? What about ligatures like "ffi"
(1 char?, 3?, something else?)?<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:8547BB8E2B8F4F93A17C500D109CF534@JohannesPC"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div style="font-family: 'Calibri'; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);
font-size: 12pt;">
<div>I’ve found “TeXcount” and saw, that there’s also a perl
script version of it.</div>
<div>What about integrating that into TeXworks / adapting it
to TWScripting?</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Sounds good, but I still have the same concerns mentioned above.<br>
It may be just what you personally need, though, and implementing it
should not be too difficult (ranging from simply installing it as a
typesetting tool as can be done for, e.g., latexmk, to writing a
script to call TeXcount on the command line (as has been done for
TeXShop (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ramonf/TeXShop/index.html">http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ramonf/TeXShop/index.html</a>))).<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
Stefan<br>
<br>
<br>
[1] <off-topic>Is TeX Turing-complete?</off-topic><br>
</body>
</html>