Am 01.02.2015 um 22:06 schrieb Jörg Weger :

Is the character count “wc --char <textfile>” returns with or without blank spaces? (Which is important for me.) “man wc” doesn’t talk about that.

I had hoped there was a better way than to edit the result of “pdftotext” in my text editor or in libreoffice writer (deleting unnecessary carriage returns and spaces by searching for regular expressions) which are able to do the count I need. In fact I had hoped that ConTeXt was able to count the characters and spaces it renders to PDF (is that theoretically possible?) …

ConTeXt has an option to count the words (you find the result in <jobname>.words) in a document but words words shorter than four letters aren’t taken into account. \setupspellchecking[state=start,method=2] \starttext \input knuth \stoptext Wolfgang

Am 01.02.2015 um 22:32 schrieb Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد :

...

words shorter than four letters aren’t taken into account.

I get *some* words shorter than four letters in the output, so there must be some other logic going on…

Do you have a few examples? Wolfgang

Hello All, As a linguist, I can say that not counting words that are shorter is an absolute NO-GO for an accurate word count and thereby character count! See below, for a non representative proof !

Am 01.02.2015 um 22:12 schrieb Wolfgang Schuster :

[snip, snip]

ConTeXt has an option to count the words (you find the result in <jobname>.words) in a document but words words shorter than four letters aren’t taken into account. word length under 4 characters : 10 word length =< 4 chars : 20

here you are missing a third of the words! That is 30% regards Keith

On 2/2/2015 4:39 PM, Alan BRASLAU wrote:

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...

ConTeXt has an option to count the words (you find the result in <jobname>.words) in a document but words words shorter than four letters aren’t taken into account. word length under 4 characters : 10 word length =< 4 chars : 20

here you are missing a third of the words! That is 30%

this feature relates to (simple) spell checking and collectign words for dedicated spell check lists and, 4 chars is nearly always avalid word which is why we discard them Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On 2/1/2015 10:06 PM, Jörg Weger wrote:

Is the character count “wc --char <textfile>” returns with or without blank spaces? (Which is important for me.) “man wc” doesn’t talk about that.

I had hoped there was a better way than to edit the result of “pdftotext” in my text editor or in libreoffice writer (deleting unnecessary carriage returns and spaces by searching for regular expressions) which are able to do the count I need. In fact I had hoped that ConTeXt was able to count the characters and spaces it renders to PDF (is that theoretically possible?) …

it's not too hard so maybe when i'm bored or see a good reason .. Hans ----------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On 2015-02-01, at 22:06, Jörg Weger wrote:

Is the character count “wc --char <textfile>” returns with or without blank spaces? (Which is important for me.) “man wc” doesn’t talk about that.

I had hoped there was a better way than to edit the result of “pdftotext” in my text editor or in libreoffice writer (deleting unnecessary carriage returns and spaces by searching for regular expressions) which are able to do the count I need. In fact I had hoped that ConTeXt was able to count the characters and spaces it renders to PDF (is that theoretically possible?) …

I am pretty sure that you can make sed filter out blank characters. So then you can just chain pdftotext, sed and wc. OTOH, here's a relevant question (and a simple answer) on SO. (It seems to count newlines, though.) JFF, I've just coded this in Emacs Lisp: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- ;; Count non-blank characters in a buffer (defun how-many-visible-chars () "Count visible (i.e., other than spaces, tabs and newlines) characters in the buffer." (interactive) (let ((count 0)) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (while (not (eobp)) (unless (looking-at-p "[ \t\n]") (setq count (1+ count))) (forward-char))) (message "%d visible characters" count))) --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- It's terribly unoptimized, but I ran it on a 300+ kB file on my low-end netbook and it ran in something like 2 seconds, so it's not that bad in practice. Also, it's not well-coded: it should e.g. return the number instead of displaying the message when called non-interactively, it might take active region into account etc. - but as a proof-of-concept, it works surprisingly well (i.e., fast).

Greetings Jörg

Best, -- Marcin Borkowski http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science Adam Mickiewicz University