Correct word-count of a LaTeX document

Question

I\'m currently searching for an application or a script that does a correct word count for a LaTeX document.

Up till now, I have only encountered script

Answer 1

latex file.tex
dvips -o - file.dvi | ps2ascii | wc -w

should give you a fairly accurate word count.

Answer 2

I went with icio's comment and did a word-count on the pdf itself by piping the output of pdftotext to wc:

pdftotext file.pdf - | wc - w 

Answer 3

If the use of a vim plugin suits you, the vimtex plugin has integrated the texcount tool quite nicely.

Here is an excerpt from their documentation:

:VimtexCountLetters       Shows the number of letters/characters or words in
:VimtexCountWords         the current project or in the selected region. The
                          count is created with `texcount` through a call on
                          the main project file similar to: >

                            texcount -nosub -sum [-letter] -merge -q -1 FILE
<
                          Note: Default arguments may be controlled with
                                |g:vimtex_texcount_custom_arg|.

                          Note: One may access the information through the
                                function `vimtex#misc#wordcount(opts)`, where
                                `opts` is a dictionary with the following
                                keys (defaults indicated): >

                                'range' : [1, line('$')]
                                'count_letters' : 0/1
                                'detailed' : 0
<
                                If `detailed` is 0, then it only returns the
                                total count. This makes it possible to use for
                                e.g. statusline functions. If the `opts` dict
                                is not passed, then the defaults are assumed.

                                             *VimtexCountLetters!*
                                             *VimtexCountWords!*
:VimtexCountLetters!      Similar to |VimtexCountLetters|/|VimtexCountWords|, but
:VimtexCountWords!        show separate reports for included files.  I.e.
                          presents the result of: >

                            texcount -nosub -sum [-letter] -inc FILE
<
                                             *VimtexImapsList*
                                             *<plug>(vimtex-imaps-list)*

The nice part about this is how extensible it is. On top of counting the number of words in your current file, you can make a visual selection (say two or three paragraphs) and then only apply the command to your selection.