Just a quicky: to get a word count estimate while working on a text in Emacs, use the emacs word-count package. You can find it at http://taiyaki.org/elisp/word-count/src/word-count.el. Beware, as it slows down working on you Emacs when it is active while editing.
It contains built-in support for working with HTML and LaTeX docments though, so your %comments and <tags> are not counted. It does inflate the word count though, as for example the line
\begin{figue}[hbf]is counted as 3 words, whereas it outputs none.
