Stop Overleaf counting words inside longtable

Question

I'm working on an assignment and need to use longtable for some data, but it counts towards the overleaf word count. How can I do this with texcount?

Answer 1

TeXcount does not come with a predefined rule for handling longtable environments, and therefore uses the default handling rules which is to treat the contents as the surrounding text.

However, you can easily add a rule to your document by adding this line

%TC:envir longtable [ignore] ignore

somewhere before the environment is used. What this does is add an environment handling rule for longtable which specifies that the longtable environment takes one argument (the column specification) which should be ignored, and that the contents should be ignored.

If the table contains code that confuses TeXcount, you might have to use stronger exclusion rules than ignore such as xx or xxx.

If all else fails, there is also the option of excluding portions of the document by surrounding them with

%TC:ignore
...
%TC:endignore

but that should normally not be necessary.

If you wish to see how TeXcount interprets your code, you can test it (or snippets of TeX/LaTeX code) on the web service.