Word Count Extension For Quarto

This extension inserts word counts into Quarto documents in the place of {{wordcount}}. Word counts can be inserted in the body or metadata (YAML header) of a document. To include the number of words in the references, use {{wordcountref}}.

You may also be interested in:

• Andrew Heiss's Word Count Extension: this prints word counts by body/references to the log file.
• Ben Marwick's wordcountaddin RStudio Addin: this provides a word count of a markdown document.

Installing

quarto add christopherkenny/wordcount

This will install the extension under the _extensions subdirectory. If you're using version control, you will want to check in this directory.

Using

After installing:

• Add

  filters:
    - wordcount

  to the YAML header of your Quarto file
• Add {{wordcount}} or {{wordcountref}} in your document (without the `tics`). Make sure there are spaces around it.

For example you could write:

There are {{wordcount}} words in this document.

and it will replace {{wordcount}} with its estimate.

You can also include additional settings like the following to control whether inline code is counted in the word total:

filters:
  - wordcount
wordcount:
  count-code-blocks: false
  count-inline-code: false

When true:

• r 2+2 increases the count by 2.
• r 2 + 2 increases the count by 4.

When set to false, inline code does not contribute to the word count.

Example

Here is the source code for a minimal example: example.qmd.

Licensing

The original wordcount filter is licensed under a MIT license to 2017-2021 pandoc Lua filters contributors. This Quarto extension is also licensed under the MIT license.