Hello, I would like to ask how difficult it would be to count the number of words in a TeX/ConTeXt document. If it's too complex, please ignore the rest of the message. Most recipes for LaTeX say that it's best to do something like "pdftotext" and then issue "wc" to count the words in the resulting text file, but windows users don't have "wc" and sometimes you only need to know the length of the abstract or so ... Some time ago Hans mentioned that he counts the number of appearance of single charactres, but I don't know how difficult it would be to extend it to count the number of words. The problem is not that well defined (how to handle equations, some would probably want to exclude headers, footers, buttons, ...), but it only needs to be an approximation and "backward compatibility" (in the sense that counter would have to result in the same number after some years) is not needed at all since algorithms might improve with time and the resulting document doesn't really depend on that number, it would only be written to the log file. My idea for the interface would be something like \startwordcount[abstract] \startframedtext Bla bla. \stopframedtext \stopwordcount which would write something like "abstract: 2 words" to the log file or \startstatistics[abstract][words] \startframedtext Bla bla. \stopframedtext \stopstatistics But this is really a low priority. I'm currently using Acrobat to copy the text, then I paste it into Office and take a look at statistics there when I need to obey some limitations. So, if there's a simple solution, I would be glad to use it, but if it takes too much time to implement it, it's probably not worth the effort. Thanks a lot, Mojca