Word Count in pdf file?

[Maratonda]

Hi,
is there an application/reader/CLI utility that is able to count the number of words in a pdf file? thanks

[aeiah]

as a quick work around, you could just copy it all into open office or whatever office progam you use and do a word count from there. you should be able to ctrl+a ctrl+c to grab everyword in the file.

there is probably another way though if you're going to be doing this a lot. most things can be manipulated and automated

[brunovecchi]

Take a look at pdfinfo. It's in the repositories.

[Maratonda]

mm..couldn't find info about the number of words...it's kind of weird that major readers, acrobat included, don't have this feature.

[aeiah]

there's an app called pdf to text. you could probably pipe it to word count with something like


pdftotext nameof.pdf | wc -w -

thats assuming -w means 'words' and pdftotext is used like that. the end hyphen will pipe the output to stdout (ie, it'll print it to the terminal screen).

i dunno if this will do strange things though. it depends how your pdf is set out and whether pdftotext does something weird when converting. if you find it leaves a lot of slashes or weird symbols where images are or something you could always pipe it to sed to remove them before piping it to wc

[adking80]

[QUOTE=aeiah;5024198]there's an app called pdf to text. you could probably pipe it to word count with something like


pdftotext nameof.pdf | wc -w -

Thanks! This worked great except the STDOUT hyphen should be before the pipe instead of after. Even though I have a lot of equations and figures, the text file looked like a reasonable approximation, except I think wc counts all the dots in the table of contents -- might have added a thousand extra words but it's ok for a ballpark :p

[s.fox]

Necromancy :D

[kaibob]

[QUOTE=aeiah;5024198]...
Thanks! This worked great except the STDOUT hyphen should be before the pipe instead of after. Even though I have a lot of equations and figures, the text file looked like a reasonable approximation, except I think wc counts all the dots in the table of contents -- might have added a thousand extra words but it's ok for a ballpark :p


I was curious about wc counting periods and ran a few tests using the command line shown below. As expected, wc does not count dots that follow a word. However, dots were counted as words when they were on a separate line. I guess this is consistent with the wc definition of word:


The wc utility shall consider a word to be a non-zero-length string of characters delimited by white space.

Not important but I was curious.


pdftotext nameof.pdf - | tr -d '.' | wc -w -