Plot your latex word count over time

It has been said that a picture paints a thousand words. But perhaps you need to hit 20,000 words for your dissertation - this picture might just spur you on.

This very basic pair of scripts lets you do a word count and then show your progress over time.

This mini-project was inspired by the "worm" visualisation on ESPN's CricInfo web site.

Requirements / Assumptions

• A unix-like installation (I used Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS at the time).
• You are using LaTeX for your dissertation/project and all your .tex files are in one directory.
• The texcount program - it comes with the texlive-extra-utils package on my system.
• Python 3 with pandas and seaborn.
• Optionally, the fonts-humor-sans package if you want the xkcd-style plot.

Usage

• Put (or link to) both the countwords.sh shell script and the plotProgress.py python script in your project directory (where your .tex files are).
• Run countwords.sh whenever you've done some work on your dissertation (or as part of your Makefile if you're automating things). This will store your word count against today's date in a file called progress.csv.
• Run plotProgress.py when you want your plot. This code can also be pasted into a Jupyter notebook.

Disclaimer

• This was just a bit of silly fun, use it and adapt it as you wish.