[Tex/LaTex] Is it possible to count text in tables using texcount

word count

I am using texcount to count the words in my LaTeX document, but I have quite a lot of text in tables and want to count those too.

Is there any way to do this using texcount? There doesn't seem to be a simple command-line switch, and the documentation for the macros section seems rather confusing.

Best Answer

You can tell texcount to treat the content of tabular environments like normal text by including the line %TC:group tabular 1 1 in your preamble. The %TC: tells the parser that a textcount instruction follows, group indicates that the instruction concerns an environment that starts with \begin{...} and ends with \end{...}, tabular is the name of the environment we're specifying, the first number defines how many arguments are to be ignored (in this case 1, the column specifications), and the second number defines what to do with the content of the environment (1 tells the parser to count the text).

Parsing the following document using the perl script or the online interface

\documentclass{article}
%TC:group tabular 1 1
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{cc}
One two & three four five six\\
Seven eight, nine & ten eleven!\\
Twelve. Thirteen.
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

returns

Words in text: 13

Alternatively, you can edit texcount.pl and change the instruction 'tabular'=>0 in the definition of my %TeXgroup to 'tabular'=>1.

If you don't want to edit your TeX file or texcount.pl, you can create a new text file called, say, TCoptions.txt containing the line %group tabular 1 1 (not %TC:group tabular 1 1) and instruct texcount.pl to take its options from that file by calling texcount.pl -opt=TCoptions.txt <TeX file>

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