[tex-live] apparent bug in detex

Robin Fairbairns Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk
Mon Nov 1 08:57:49 CET 2010


cfrees at imapmail.org wrote:

> It works reasonably well for things like papers, though. I can't
> imagine that sort of construction being a problem there. In any case,
> it is currently what TeXShop uses and it is very handy to be able to
> get statistics in TeXShop without having to change applications. I know
> it is not entirely accurate at the best of times.
> 
> I would like to be able to get an accurate word count in some way. But
> there doesn't seem to be a good way of doing this for (La)TeX documents.

the best you can do for latex documents, i think, is wordcount, which
uses various trickery to make every latex line a single word (iirc),
which you then count the lines of.

> If I can't get an accurate count, an overestimate is usually better
> than an underestimate because I'm usually trying to get something
> within a word limit. And footnotes need to be included in my counts.

hence my suggestion of a switch; i think norbert's "semantic" argument
is a rational one.

> I would also like to be able to get quick statistics in TeXShop.
> 
> Usually, I've relied on TeXShop's statistics and, thus, detex.  Right
> now I'm using the 2009 version of detex although this is something of a
> hack.
> 
> I just discovered texcount which can give me a more accurate result
> although it isn't perfect either.
> 
> But, anyway, if it is regarded as a feature to count some footnotes but
> not others, so be it. I think that's a strange feature, but who am I to
> say?

a suggestion from karl would carry more weight than most, but if no-one
else wants to try, i'll mail trinkle to suggest a -f switch.

robin


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