[OS X TeX] How does Texhshop count words?

[Herbert Schulz]

> On Dec 20, 2017, at 9:29 AM, Themis Matsoukas <tmatsoukas at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> I used Edit/ Statistics… to count words in my source file. With the entire file selected (from first line to last, comments and all), I get a word count of 3045/20021 characters. If I select from my \begin{abstract} to the end of the file, I get 3381 words/22663 characters! I didn’t expect the count to be exact but I would have thought that a subset of the document would give a lower count that the whole. With some experimentation I discovered that when  the line \begin{document} is excluded,  the count increases by ~300 words. That’s with a revtex document, I am not sure if the same is seen with other classes. 
> 
> Not a big deal but since Dick is a mathematician I thought he’d want to know that there is a discontinuity that breaks monotonicity in the count :)
> 
> Themis

Howdy,

If I had to guess I'd say it uses `detex` (to remove commands) and then `wc` to count words.

For curiosities sake try downloading DropTeXCount.zip and use of of the two drop-scripts enclosed in the unzipped folder to do a count in the whole document. You can get that file from <https://herbs.github.io>. Those scripts use `texcount` (part of TeX Live) to do the word count.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)