Feature Suggestions ⇒ word count

[happyblueeyes]

Why doesn't TexnicCenter have a good word count facility? I don't think it has a simple word count option presently. Does it? I hoe the developers would look into it since word count is a necessity for guys submitting papers to scientific conferences.

Thanks in advance,
happyblueeyes

[localghost]

[…] I hoe the developers would look into it since word count is a necessity for guys submitting papers to scientific conferences. […]

I participated in the publication of some papers but never experienced the necessity of word count. Note that the routine for doing that would have to exclude commands. And I wonder how mathematical expressions should be handled.

[Cupric]

I make my document a PDF and then use a PDF word counter to get the word count.

There are a lot of PDF word counters, but most of them are not free. The one I am currently using is free and is called Translator's Abacus and is available from http://www.globalrendering.com/download.html.

[gregh]

Hi!

Regarding word counting in TeXnicCenter: Defining an output profile with a word counting script works absolutely smoothly for me. The best solution seems a perl script called texWordCount.pl that counts words through the logical structure of a latex document or project. That is, you get word counts for each hierarchical level (total, per chapter, per section, down to subsubsections). This is much more than what you get using approaches based on untex | wc.

In detail: Define a new TeXnicCenter output profile (e.g., "LaTeX => word count") with LaTeX, BibTeX and MakeIndex disabled, and set the Postprocessor to run Perl with argument "<path to>\texWordCount.pl %pm" and redirection to "%bm.wc". So F7 gets your project scanned. To display the results, in the Viewer tab simply put your favourite text editor (e.g., "notepad++.exe") with appropriate argument (for notepad++, it's simply "%bm.wc").

ps -- A nice alternative would be to send a DDE command ("open("%bm.wc")") to TeXnicCenter itself, but I wasn't able to get this to run, neither by commandline argument with "/ddecmd" nor by a DDE Open command. If anyone succeeds, please post

Best

gregor

[Stefanie]

i tried your solution, but it doesn't seem to work... this is the generated output:

# LaTeX word count file format 1.0 produced by C:\Windows\texWordCount.pl
# run as "C:\Windows\texWordCount.pl "
# format: \t x level of detail, number of words \t section name
0 whole - <STDIN>

[Stefanie]

i think i found the problem: texwordcount.pl doesn't support spaces in path names. when your .tex file is saved in e.g. c:\documents and settings\ , you get an error saying the path name doesn't exist. I don't know how to fix it, though.

[tillj]

I also can't get it to work.
I followed your describtion as much as I could understand, and there is no complaining from the computer when I hit ctrl+F7, and id displays a line saying Output Profile WordCount. But nothing else. If I view the output it opens notepad, but it is all blank.

Does the script have to be in a specific folder?

Could you be more specific which redirection should be used and what entry exactly should be in which field.

Otherwise, any ideas, suggestions?

Cheers
Till

[neeraj2608]

i think i found the problem: texwordcount.pl doesn't support spaces in path names. when your .tex file is saved in e.g. c:\documents and settings\ , you get an error saying the path name doesn't exist. I don't know how to fix it, though.

Try replacing the double quotes with a single quote. This escapes spaces in the file path on my system (Vista 64-bit).

[CoMicFont]

Does the script have to be in a specific folder?

Nope, but you would need to have a Perl interpreter installed...

[magicmoose]

Here is an online version of the script: http://folk.uio.no/einarro/Services/texcount.html