Known problems and issues

There are some known problems and limitations. Some of these may be improved in future releases, whereas some are general problems either with TeXcount or with counting words in LaTeX documents in general and are therefore likely to remain.

• Though most commonly used macros should be handled, there may be some that are not. This is particularly true for macros coming from various packages.
• Numbers in the text are counted as words. This may not always be appropriate. Note that while numbers are counted as words, numbers enclosed by $...$ are considered inlined formulae and not counted as words.
• Some letter modifiers such as \" are recognised by TeXcount, but for some languages these may be interpreted as macros or symbols and cause words containing them to be split in two giving rise to exaggerated word counts. Using the option -relaxed may help TeXcount recognise some letter modifiers.
• Nested macros and begin-end groups need not behave as desired, so users should have to check the details.
• Macros that take text as [...] options, e.g. \item[text], will not be able to count this text. This is because the rule to ignore options on the form [...] is hard coded in TeXcount an there are no features to handle them in a satisfying way. The best solution I have to suggest is to replace \item[text]... with another macro which uses the form \descitem{text}... as explained in the FAQ. However, all this will change from version 3.0!
• Complex macros may confuse TeXcount. This is particularly true of [...] options that have unexpected or unexpectedly long values, although the -relaxed option may help TeXcount handle these better. Macros that follow alternative patterns, e.g. \vskip, will not be handled well as TeXcount will not recognise the syntax.

To ensure that macros and environments you use are handled appropriately, I strongly recommend using the -v options and looking over the results.