Dave Courvoisier's Blog

A simple word count.  That’s all I want.  To be able to quote a client, I need to know how many words are in the content.

You’d be surprised how often it comes up, and how difficult it can be.  Right?

Well, in my search, I came upon a great little FREE program, and it’s about as simple to run as I’ve ever seen.  Verifiably accurate, too.

It’s called TRANSLATOR’S ABACUS – “…An automatic wordcount program for HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, RTF, and text files.”

You download the .Zip file, open it, and the extraction creates two files…an execution file, and a user’s guide.  When you launch the .exe file, it opens a box.  You drag the PDF or HTML file to the box, and you get a read-out like this:

Now, granted, MS Word already offers a word count function, but Adobe Acrobat does not, and LOTS of stuff is in .pdf these days.

Before I found the Translator’s Abacus, I spent money on a program called Smart PDF Converter (which I love, BTW), that would convert any PDF file to all sorts of different output file formats (HTML, XLS, JPEG, TXT, etc).  I’d commonly convert to a Word.doc and do the word count.

But Translator’s Abacus sure makes it easy.

Anyhow, I did a word count comparison on an entire book of almost 70,000 pages, and the word count difference between the two programs was only 10.  Not bad!
Let me know if you’re aware of any other conversion or word-count program that are free, shareware, or low-cost willya?

CourVO

2 Responses to “Simple Word Count”