General ⇒ How to use TeXcount?

[eiger3970]

Hello,
I've typed up a document now in LaTex and would like to check how many words.
I am unable to find a button to select, or any other such options.
So I found <a href="http://app.uio.no/ifi/texcount/faq.html">TeXcount</a>, which is installed with my LaTex version, but I can't use it?

Any examples of a command to count my LaTex words?
Or better yet, a user friendly button to select to count my words?

[nlct]

First of all texcount is a Perl script, so you need to make sure you have Perl installed. Some operating systems, such as Unix-like systems, have Perl already installed, but Windows users typically need to install a Perl distribution in order to run any Perl scripts. There are two popular Perl distributions for Windows: Strawberry Perl and ActivePerl. If you don't know whether or not you have Perl installed, open the MS Dos Prompt and type

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perl -version

If you get a message that's something like "Bad command or file name" then you don't have it installed. If it is installed then it should display the version number, copyright etc.

Once you have Perl installed, then you can run texcount. If you want to be able to run it by clicking a button in your text editor, then you need to say what editor you're using (TeXWorks, TeXnicCenter, WinEdt etc).

If you want to run texcount from the command prompt, then you may be able to run it just using

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texcount tex-file-name-here

or you might need to do

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perl texcount tex-file-name-here

where tex-file-name-here is the name of your TeX file. (The path will also be required if you're not in the same directory as that file.)

Regards
Nicola Talbot