Getting LaTex word count which ignores footnotes

I’ve been wrighting my essays in LaTex every since I discovered that it made footnoting and other various items easier. The one thing it made harder, however, was doing the word-count.

Wanting to know how far through my 5000 word essay I was, I started trying to work out how. Lots of people say things like “Turn it into a pdf and copy it into word”. I’m sorry, but I don’t have that kind of time.

I spent some time searching, and eventually came accross a perl script:

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~kanmy/software/texWordCount.pl

That I found here:

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~kanmy/software.html

This was wonderful. Hats off to the guys that wrote it and updated it. However, I needed it to ignore the words in footnotes. They don’t count towards the word count for my theological essays, so I hacked it until it seemed to work. It works even if you include \textit{} to itallicise the book name, which I have to do in my footnotes. If you need it to do more, you will have to hack it yourself.

http://blog.valhalla.jara23.co.uk/?page_id=275

Also, this was a quick hack. It may not work in all cases. If you find it doesn’t, feel free to leave a comment, and I might fix it. Also, the word count has not been verified.

~Black Xanthus