[tex-live] apparent bug in detex

[cfrees at imapmail.org]

On Mon 1st Nov, 2010 at 07:57, Robin Fairbairns seems to have written:

> cfrees at imapmail.org wrote:
>
>> It works reasonably well for things like papers, though. I can't
>> imagine that sort of construction being a problem there. In any case,
>> it is currently what TeXShop uses and it is very handy to be able to
>> get statistics in TeXShop without having to change applications. I know
>> it is not entirely accurate at the best of times.
>>
>> I would like to be able to get an accurate word count in some way. But
>> there doesn't seem to be a good way of doing this for (La)TeX documents.
>
> the best you can do for latex documents, i think, is wordcount, which
> uses various trickery to make every latex line a single word (iirc),
> which you then count the lines of.

I did some investigating when I found the problem with detex and tried
to use wordcount but couldn't get it to work. I didn't pursue this in
any depth but the error messages vaguely suggested to me that it might
not work for documents designed for use with pdflatex. But I could be
quite wrong and this not be the source of the problem at all.

>> If I can't get an accurate count, an overestimate is usually better
>> than an underestimate because I'm usually trying to get something
>> within a word limit. And footnotes need to be included in my counts.
>
> hence my suggestion of a switch; i think norbert's "semantic" argument
> is a rational one.

This would be good if it was able to treat both \footnote{} and
footnote environments consistently.

Thanks,
Clea

>> I would also like to be able to get quick statistics in TeXShop.
>>
>> Usually, I've relied on TeXShop's statistics and, thus, detex.  Right
>> now I'm using the 2009 version of detex although this is something of a
>> hack.
>>
>> I just discovered texcount which can give me a more accurate result
>> although it isn't perfect either.
>>
>> But, anyway, if it is regarded as a feature to count some footnotes but
>> not others, so be it. I think that's a strange feature, but who am I to
>> say?
>
> a suggestion from karl would carry more weight than most, but if no-one
> else wants to try, i'll mail trinkle to suggest a -f switch.
>
> robin
>