I’m under strict instructions that the article I’m currently writing should be under 11,000 words. How to keep track of that while using LaTeX (with a lot of mark-up commands that won’t be separate words in the final product and a full bibliography that doesn’t get compiled until the pdf gets produced and thus is not in reflected in the length of the source file)? Easy, run pdflatex on the source (including the bibliography compilation) and count the words in the resulting pdf. But how does that work? My installation includes a ghostscript utility called ps2ascii (I assume that came with MacTex). So, it really is trivial; in Terminal:

ps2ascii test.pdf | wc -w

Answer: 10198. Whew! Still in the game.