What?

Point latexsnapshots to your git repo, and it will go through the commits and identify those that change your tex files in a significant way, and regenerate the pdf files. It will also take thumbnails of those pdfs, and show them in a web UI.

Install it

    pip install latexsnapshots

Screenshot

Live Demo

See the output of the export command here http://www.eugenewu.net/latexsnapshots/html/

Usage

• Create a config file (below)

• Generate snapshots of your latex document. The code currently creates a snapshot every time the Levenshtein distance between the *.tex documents is greater than a configurable distancte, and when it's been more than X hours since the last snapshotted commit.

    latexsnapshots latex
  

  • Note that latexsnapshots will create a sqlite database file based on your config file to store metadata about the snapshots.
    The dburi path is relative to your current directory.

• Run the server to see thumbnails of your snapshots. You can run this while latexsnapshots latex is running

    latexsnapshots server
  

• Export everything into a folder for deployment as static website: See example

    mkdir outputdir
    latexsnapshots export -o outputdir
  
    # see the website
    cd outputdir/
    python -m SimpleHTTMServer 8000
  
    # go to localhost:8000/html
  

Create a config file

Create a python file called config.py in your current directory. latexsnapshots will look in your current directory to import this file.

    ###########################################
    #
    #    Required
    #
    ##########################################


    # absolute path to the git_repo
    # Make sure things are committed!  
    # We will need to checkout many commit points as part of the rollback procedure.
    git_repo = "/tmp/animated"

    # what name for the paper?
    paper_name = "infovis16_approx"

    # the latex document directory (within the git repo)
    latex_dir = "docs/infovis16_approx"

    # A function that returns shell commands for compiling the latex doc and 
    # copying it to the destination location
    def make_cmds(dstpath):
      """
      @param dstpath Where the generated latex file should be moved to
      @return a list of shell commands to run to generate the latex file and move it to dstpath
      """
      cmds = [
        "cd /tmp/animated/docs/infovis16_approx",
        "latexrun main",
        "cp latex.out/main.pdf %s" % dstpath
      ]
      return cmds


    ###########################################
    #
    #    Optional
    #
    ##########################################

    # minimum edit distance of tex files to take a snapshot (4000 is pretty conservative)
    min_edit_distance = 1000

    # Don't create a snapshot if the previous one was within X hours of this commit
    min_hours_gap = 12

    # where to store the data, no need to change this
    dburi = "sqlite:///latex2.db"