[OS X TeX] Word Count possibilities

[William F. Adams]

On Monday, April 19, 2004, at 08:28  PM, Dr.John R.Vokey wrote:

> Unfortunately, although WordService is great, it requires simple text  
> files, as do all the other suggestions.  None of them work on the  
> finished (i.e., compiled) document, which is, I believe, what Michael  
> S. Hanson was asking for (and, what I desire as well).
>
> One solution I have come up with is to save the pdf of the compiled  
> document as plain text from Acrobat, then strip out headers and page  
> numbers, etc. that Acrobat leaves in for some strange reason, then  
> highlight and count using WordService.  Not very efficient, but it  
> works.
>
> Detexing the source file is of no use because one needs the count  
> *after* the TeX commands, especially bibliographic commands, have been  
> expanded.  Hence, another possibility is to TeX4ht the document to  
> html (which works on the dvi and, hence, after all macros have been  
> fully expanded) and then read *that* result into Word or whatever to  
> get a word count.  Again, clumsy, but workable.

All excellent points.

Have you looked at dvi2tty? There's also at least one successor to it...

Here's a classic old post on this:

http://groups.google.com/ 
groups?selm=9305112212.AA16621%40dcs.shef.ac.uk&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain

and of course it _is_ an FAQ in the TeX FAQ:

http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=wordcount

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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