[TxMt] Re: Word Count ?

Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

On Nov 29, 2006, at 7:33 PM, Tim Lahey wrote:

...

Probably the easiest thing to do is make a command that runs detex on the document (which strips the commands out) and pipe that through the word count.

That assumes one is not using commands that automatically generate text. I.e. what happens if I do:

\newcommand{\this}{Hi there! }

and then the document contains:

\this\this\this

I would guess detex will not count those 6 words, will it?

So really the only thing we can do is actually typeset the document? This seems problematical to me, especially if we want general solutions that we can use with languages other than TeX.