I rewrote the command with pdftotext, an open source text extraction utility that is included with xpdf.[1] It is *significantly* faster than the command using ps2ascii. However, it returns a different word count from the previous command. I compared the text generated by both ps2ascii and pdftotext. Neither will be the basis of an accurate word count. ps2ascii includes page numbers and inserts whitespace between the two parts of hyphenated words. pdftotext tends to subtitute whitespace for ligatures. There are other anomalies with each as well. Based on a small amount of experimentation with some of my documents, it seems that pdftotext gives a slightly better estimate. So the situation is this: with detex you get a low estimate and with pdf text extraction you get a high and slightly more accurate estimate. Disappointing, but perhaps there is a better way. All the best, Mark
[1] Mac OS X binary for xpdf (xpdf-tools-3.dmg) can be found here: http://users.phg-online.de/tk/MOSXS/