Please note that Apple's prudent security measures mean that you must, when first opening the app, authorise it to open in the security section of System Preferences by clicking 'Open Anyway'. If you're interested in building the app yourself, then download my script, xpdf, and platypus.
I then made the wrapper for the script using platypus. I wrote a minimal bash script which passes the file added to xpdf. The app is essentially a wrapper for xpdf, making use of the pdftotext command. Clicking on this sentence will take you to the latest release of the app. Nothing here is remotely original, but it does make an annoying process slightly more pleasant. I created this because I was quite annoyed with having to deal with PDF word counting for my MPhil disssertation, and it was easier to make a wrapper for the command line prompts. If the PDF does not have searchable text, I recommend you use the lightweight application ocrmypdfmac by David Pinney, which can quickly and freely make the PDF ready to use with pdfwordcounter. It's useful for all those situations where word counts are needed, and not easily obtainable from PDF files. Pdfwordcounter is a very minimal macOS app for counting words in a PDF.
