Hi again,
If you look at the pdf/ps source file, it is filled with special commands and things. I suppose if you could export the pdf file to a txt file, then you could count the words there with ease.
Believe me, I've had a good look inside pdf files. Not somewhere I'd like to live! Re exporting: nothing obvious rears its head up here, and Preview only allows you to export to graphical formats from pdf.
You are better off with the small error from counting words in the latex source instead.
Agreed: that's definitely what I would do if faced with such a task, so a simple command with . Thankfully I've rarely encountered a task in which the exact number of words is going to be crucial, but I imagine some essays/projects might have strict limits. Still, if you submit a pdf file the assessor is going to have to find a way to determine the word count!
Just for completeness' sake I tried Adobe's online pdf conversion tool on the same file I mentioned earlier (250 page pdf).
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
It's been literally 5 minutes now and the thing is still spinning its wheels ("Please wait while the requested PDF file is being converted"), so I don't think that's going to come charging in to rescue the situation!
Cheers, Paul