Saw this tweet and thought it was cool. The code used to produce the video was not made public, so I whipped something up myself.
This tool internally uses git checkout --force to deal with files that may be produced between compilation steps. Absolutely do not use this tool on your live repository! Instead, do a clean checkout of your repository to a temporary directory or copy your entire local repository and run this tool on there. I take no responsibility for any broken repositories. 😛
This utility checks out all revisions of a specified repository, runs a specified compilation command (make, pdflatex, whatnot) to generate your PDF file and renders all pages onto a blank image. The images can then be concatenated into a GIF.
Requires python3. I use PIL to render the frames, so I am not entirely sure how well this utility runs outside of Linux.
pip install -r requirements.txt
To install all dependencies.
To list all available switches, run:
python main.py -h
An example usage would be:
python3 main.py --command "make" --repository "/tmp/CopyOfMyPaperRepository" --pdfpath "/tmp/CopyOfMyPaperRepository/output/paper.pdf" --gifpath "movie.gif" --subdirectory "doc" --starthash "8847d7cd664ba98b0dea375e4cb9847fb1afccc3"
The above command will expect a valid git repository at /tmp/CopyOfMyPaperRepository. It will change the directory to /tmp/CopyOfMyPaperRepository/doc, since the --subdirectory was specified. Each revisions, starting from 8847d7cd664ba98b0dea375e4cb9847fb1afccc3, will be checked out and compiled using make. The resulting images are then put together in a GIF called movie.gif.
