In particular we note the following guidelines:
- The manuscript must be submitted in single column. The following constraints apply: Word count: max. 3000. a. Excluding: title, authors, affiliations, references, metadata tables. b. Including: abstract, running text, captions, footnotes. c. Max. 6 figures.
- The manuscript must have line numbers.
- At least one of the two mandatory metadata tables located at the end of the article template must be filled in and included in the manuscript.
latexmk -pdf doc.tex
detex strips away any latex-code and wc counts the words that you are left with:
detex doc.tex | wc --words