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Rather frequently, I find myself wishing that there were an easy way to count the number of words in a .odt or .fodt file from command line. Most solutions I’ve come across make use of the (very handy) odt2txt tool, but this doesn’t play nice with .fodt files (at least with the version available in the Ubuntu 16.04 repos). So, I came up with a simple Python script that is a “good enough” solution for my use cases (though it may not be entirely robust). It’s available here in case it’s of use to anyone else. Working through it gave me a bit better understanding/appreciation of the .odt format and how it works. Tweaks welcome!

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to drop in on John Cayley’s digital language arts workshop at Brown University for a wonderful discussion on language, translatability, and the promise/perils of natural language processing. I won’t try to summarise everything that was discussed here, but it is always interesting to hear (particularly digital) writers bring up their obsessions and anxieties around the nature of language itself.