Statistics module

The Statistics module computes and displays quantitative indicators about your document's content — number of words, characters and paragraphs, and the list of fonts used. Useful for checking the length of a text before publication, verifying compliance with a word limit, or identifying the typographic resources required to reproduce the PDF faithfully. You reach this module from the General category of the Dashboard.

Automatic computation

When the module opens, HtkPDF analyses the whole document in the background. During the computation, a progress spinner and the message "Analysing…" are shown. How long the computation takes depends on the number of pages and the amount of text; for most documents, the result appears in less than a second.

The statistics are automatically refreshed as soon as the document is modified (adding or deleting pages, an editing operation). That lets you follow how the counters evolve as you make changes.

Text analysis section

Four main indicators summarise the written content of the PDF:

Words

Counts the number of words present in the document's text layer. A word is defined as a sequence of characters separated by spaces or punctuation. For a professional document, this number is the main criterion when an editorial limit has to be respected (an article, a dissertation, a report).

Characters (without spaces)

Counts the printable characters (letters, digits, punctuation), excluding spaces and line breaks. This is the useful value for typographic contexts (characters per line, layout).

Characters (with spaces)

Counts every character, spaces included. This is the value shown by default in most word processors (Word, Pages) and required by some editorial platforms (academic journals, press agencies).

Paragraphs

Counts the number of text blocks separated by paragraph breaks.

Fonts section

This section lists every font used by the document's pages. For each font, the internal name (as recorded in the PDF) is shown.

If no text is detected (a pure image PDF, a scanned document without OCR), a "No font detected" message is shown.

Practical uses

Graphic compliance: checking that a document respects the imposed typographic guidelines (a corporate typeface, fonts forbidden for a tender, and so on);
Prepress preparation: a professional printer needs to know which fonts to embed in order to reproduce the document faithfully, especially if the fonts are not standard;
Display diagnosis: if a PDF displays oddly on another machine, the font list indicates which ones should be available on the reader's side;
Format migration: before a conversion to Word or another format, checking that the fonts used are available in the target environment.

Limits of the analysis

The analysis covers only the PDF's vector text layer. For scanned documents without OCR, the counters will all return zero;
Annotations (notes, highlights, text stamps) are not counted in the statistics;
Characters in completed forms are taken into account insofar as they are written into the text layer when filled in;
Compound words (for example "merry-go-round") may be counted differently depending on whether there are spaces around the hyphens.

Typical use cases

Length checking: confirming that an article respects a 1,500-word limit before submission;
Estimating translation cost: since translation rates are often per word, the counter lets you quickly assess the expected quote;
Layout audit: checking that the paragraphs are structured correctly (a PDF with 12 expected paragraphs that returns 240 betrays a layout problem);
Detecting scanned PDFs: if the statistics show 0 words for a document visibly full of text, that is the sign of an image PDF — use the Text extraction module with OCR to retrieve the content.

Note: to export these statistics (into a report, for example), copy and paste the displayed values manually. HtkPDF does not (at this stage) offer a direct export of the statistics to a file.

Screenshots

1 screenshot — click to enlarge