I'm writing my masters thesis and my supervisor has picked up my sentence structure, in that they are too long. She commented that Microsoft Word has a feature to investigate 'large' sentences. How can I do this with TeX? I'm using a mac and TexShop.
I think this is the easiest way. First, make sure you have pdftotext and diction installed. These should be available via MacPorts.
- Render your document to a PDF. Let's assume it's called
paper.pdf
. - Grab the plain text from the PDF using
pdftotext
. At the terminal, run this:pdftotext paper.pdf paper.txt
- Now run
style -l N paper.txt
, where you should replaceN
with a number. This will print out all lines of your document that are longer thanN
words.
Alternatively, you can do it all as a one-liner:
$ pdflatex paper.tex && pdftotext paper.pdf - | style -l 20
style
is extremely powerful and has many other features. For a good overview, see here.
-
One could alternatively use DeTeX instead of
pdftotext
to get a plain text version to send tostyle
. I find, however, that pdftotext works a lot better, especially if one has a lot of markup in his or her document that DeTeX doesn't understand (e.g., TikZ). pdftotext also works a lot better if one splits one's original document up into multiple .tex files that one \include{}'s. – ESultanik Aug 26 '10 at 12:38 -
using
style
without any parameters will give you a summary that will tell you the % of long ("at least 27 word") sentences. – Geoff Aug 26 '10 at 13:35 -
@ESultanik, do you know how to tell diction/style that abbreviations are not (usually) ends of sentences? (Dr., Fig., etc.) – Geoff Aug 26 '10 at 13:42
-
@Geoff This should work for most cases (except for 'etc.', but it's easy to extend the regex for those special cases): pdftotext paper.pdf - | sed 's/([A-Z][a-zA-Z]*)\./\1/g' | ... – ESultanik Aug 26 '10 at 14:37
-
@ESultanik. Just drop the period, okay. It seems to me that style should support this. – Geoff Aug 26 '10 at 15:33
cat file.tex | sed 's/[^.]//g' | wc -c
should give you a number that is one more than the total number of period marks used. – Willie Wong Aug 25 '10 at 18:34