Word count a PDF in Acrobat Pro 2023...

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Ok, word counting is not easy (eg. headers and footers), but is perhaps not impossibly hard either.

Does our trusty Acrobat still not count words in a PDF now it is 20 years old?

What is our best option for a clearly defined and accurate count of the words in a PDF in the Adobe Creative Cloud: select all text in Acrobat Pro and paste it into InCopy?

Thanks for the widom.

S

Snooker31142775nwuv

Participant

Correctness

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radzmar

Community Expert

Acrobat is not a word processor and PDF was not invented to be edited. Use MS Word or similar apps for counting words.

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billlanyonAuthor

Participant

Agreed, but Acrobat could be seen as a digital text delivery platform? Say you are required to submit a thesis in PDF format and with a strict word count limit... would it not be great to be able to entrust an intelligent word count to it as the final platform before delivery? The issue seems to me to be the lack of transparency as to how words are counted in all page popular layout applications, the dreaded MS word included...

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jonathanp41862675

Participant

Perfectly right. It's not clear to me why radzmar thinks that word counting should necessarily be a function of word processing. Here's another common use case: you run a journal or some other kind of project that receives submission via PDF (could be lots of things: fellowship, grant applications, writing samples for jobs, etc. etc.), and you want to see if the PDF meets the required word length. In my workflow, we do redaction (anonymization) in Adobe Acrobat, but unfortunately we have to use an online tool to get a word count since Acrobat won't do. I think it's absurd that PDF software so advanced and so expensive doesn't have this kind of functionality.

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