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?
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.