Correct word-count of a LaTeX document

Question

I'm currently searching for an application or a script that does a correct word count for a LaTeX document.

Up till now, I have only encountered scripts that only work on a single file but what I want is a script that can safely ignore LaTeX keywords and also traverse linked files...ie follow \include and \input links to produce a correct word-count for the whole document.

With vim, I currently use ggVGg CTRL+G but obviously that shows the count for the current file and does not ignore LaTeX keywords.

Does anyone know of any script (or application) that can do this job?

Answer 1

I use texcount. The webpage has a Perl script to download (and a manual).

It will include tex files that are included (\input or \include) in the document (see -inc), supports macros, and has many other nice features.

When following included files you will get detail about each separate file as well as a total. For example here is the total output for a 12 page document of mine:

TOTAL COUNT Files: 20 Words in text: 4188 Words in headers: 26 Words in float captions: 404 Number of headers: 12 Number of floats: 7 Number of math inlines: 85 Number of math displayed: 19 

If you're only interested in the total, use the -total argument.

Answer 2

I went with icio's comment and did a word-count on the pdf itself by piping the output of pdftotext to wc:

pdftotext file.pdf - | wc - w