Word counts in latex

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latex-wordcount

Table of contents

• About
• Requirements
• Commands
  • Quick summary
  • Document wordcount
  • Document wordcount (more accurate)
  • File wordcount
  • Section wordcount
  • Selection wordcount
• Settings
  • Enable shell escape
  • Maximum section depth

About

Given the nature of LaTeX, it is practically impossible to get an accurate word count for any non-trivial document. However, this package provides several methods of estimating the word count using tools that come with a TeX Live distribution, such as TeXcount and wordcount.tex.

Most of the provided commands use TeXcount, as it is the quicker and more lenient program. However, it is likely to underestimate the wordcount most of the time. The one command that uses wordcount.tex only works on the entire document and requires generating a log file that grows larger as the document gets longer. This one will likely overestimate the word count, so (to reiterate the earlier point) these methods are approximations only and you as the user must decide how to interpret the results.

• Note: I recently added code folding based on section commands. This is experimental, must be explicitly enabled to use, and will likely be removed at some point. For now though, I’ll leave it here because this package already has section range finding logic, so implementing folding based on this range was easy enough.

Requirements

• Most commands need the texcount command line program. This comes with a standard TeX Live installation. I believe it also comes with MiKTeX, but cannot confirm.
  • Windows: TeXcount may need to be set up following the instructions given here.
• The Document wordcount (more accurate) command only works on a UNIX shell, as it currently uses commands such as echo and grep. Most Windows users will be unable to use this command for now.
• The above command also requires that the absolute path to the root file has no spaces in it. E.g., /Users/username/my TeX files/main.tex will not work.

Commands

Quick summary

• Document wordcount: counts entire document, from start of root file, including all input files.
• Document wordcount (more accurate): more accurate version of Document wordcount, but takes longer and requires generation of a log file containing a line for every character in the output.
• File wordcount: counts only current file, and does not count input files (the only one that doesn’t).
• Section wordcount: counts the current section, including all input files.
• Selection wordcount: counts the current selection, including input files.

Document wordcount

This will count using TeXcount, which uses a set of LaTeX specific rules to better estimate the word count. It’s quite fast, as it does not compile the document, so useful if you want a rough estimate of the word count. Note that it will not know any macro definitions, so take this into consideration if you use macros that expand into a group of words. It will probably underestimate the word count in most cases. See it’s homepage here.

Document wordcount (more accurate)

Forgive the name. (this does not work on files with spaces in the path; see top note)

This command runs a different program, and actually compiles your document. The output should be a file called wordcount.log located in the same directory as the root file (the one that gets compiled; magic comments are followed). Basically, it redefines several TeX commands to force the log file to include each character and word. A simple search command then finds the number of characters and words, and prints the result.

• Note: because the file is compiled, and it prints every character to the log file, this method is slow. It also takes a lot of space, so be mindful of that. The taken space increases as the document gets bigger.

This method is more accurate than TeXcount; it ‘knows’ macro definitions, so (for example) it will correctly give the number of words inserted by the lipsum command.

However, it makes no distinction between the type of any text. Tables, captions, math formulas (each individual term; even superscripts are counted), code (in a minted block), etc. will all be included in the count.

File wordcount

Back to TeXcount, this command will run it on the currently open file (not the root one). It will also ignore any input, include, etc. commands that would be honoured by Document wordcount.

Section wordcount

First, the text in the current section is gathered. This section is determined by looking back from the cursor position to the nearest section command, where section command is one of the following: part, chapter, section, subsection, subsubsection, paragraph, subparagraph. However, only section commands of the level set by maximum section depth or lower (shallower?) will be recognised. When found, the section start (that will eventually be passed to texcount) is set to the beginning of that section command.

Next, it will then look for the next section command of same or lower level as the starting one. When found, it will set the end of the section range to just before this section command.

• If not found in the current file, it will stop there. It will not attempt to determine the document structure and work out where the source continues.

Finally, it copies the text in this range and pastes it into a temporary file created by the npm tmp package. It then runs texcount on this temporary file, but set up so it thinks it’s in the same directory as the original file, ensuring relative file paths still work (as input files are included if they are within the section).

Selection wordcount

Similar to Section wordcount, this command will count the words in a selected region. Specifically, it will create a temporary file in the system temp directory and write the selected text to it. It will then run texcount on this temporary file, specifying the directory as that of the original file. This way, input statements (and others) will still work if they are completely within the selection. TeXcount will not see the outside of the selection, so if the selection cuts into a macro it may not behave as expected.

In both this case and the above, the temporary file is deleted as soon as the results are returned.

Settings

Enable shell escape

The shell escape flag is generally used to allow LaTeX to execute arbitrary code. This can be useful for packages such as minted, where the syntax colours are determined using an external program.

This option is not necessary for TeXcount, as it works by parsing the source. However, wordcount.tex requires the document be compiled, so any packages that require shell escape need this flag enabled.

Maximum section depth

When counting the words in a section, this setting determines the deepest section command to look for. For example, consider the following document layout

section{S:1}
  (1)
  subsection{SS:1-1}
    (2)
  subsection{SS:1-2}
    (3)
section{S:2}

A setting of subsection will cause the count when the cursor is at (1) to be for the entire S:1 to S:2, the count at (2) to be between SS:1-1 and SS:1-2, and the count at (3) to be between SS:1-2 and S:2.

A setting of section will cause all three locations to count the same area (S:1 to S:2), because the deeper subsection commands will be ignored.

Ideas

• Config file could be used for custom section commands and their ‘level’; section goes from current section (by looking above) to next section command of same or greater level.