papervis

Visualize the paper writing process through your Git commit history

Installation

This is custom software so it should be installed under /opt at

git clone depth -1 https://github.com/matthewfeickert/papervis.git /opt/papervis

However, functionality to use it as a system wide command line utility hasn't been added yet. So for the time being you should clone it to wherever you'd like to run from.

Requirements

papervis has the following dependencies:

• Git
• LaTeX
• pdfnup # provided by LaTeX
• latexmk # provided by LaTeX
• awk
• convert
• ffmpeg

and additionally requires that the Git repo you want to visualize has a Makefile with the following variables set in it:

• LATEX
• FILENAME

Example:

FILENAME = analysis_paper
LATEX = lualatex

Use

You can query papervis for its options

bash papervis.sh --help
USAGE:
    papervis [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help              Print help information and quit

OPTIONS:
        --url <url>         URL of the project Git repo (HTTPS, SSH, or local path)
        --start <start>     Git commit hash to start at.
                            If left blank it will default to the first commit
                            in the project repo
        --grid <grid>       The dimensions of the grid. Ex: 9x6
        --name <name>       The name of the output .mp4 file. Default is papervis
        --target <target>   The name of an optional Makefile target to run as
                            part of the build

Once you run papervis check in the build directory for the output .mp4 file.

Example

bash papervis.sh \
    --url https://github.com/matthewfeickert/Dedman-Thesis-Latex-Template.git \
    --start 2d8d5ca13127584578cdb9806fef98dbaab60a16 \
    --grid 9x6 \
    --target figures

find build -iname "*.mp4"
# build/papervis.mp4

Authors

• Matthew Feickert (@matthewfeickert)
• Leo C. Stein (@duetosymmetry)