epicdiff - diffs of epics, in an epic manner

MAINTENANCE NOTE: The original code in this repository is from 2010-2011. This code was split off from an earlier repository, so Git history is sadly not here. I'm going to eventually tidy the project up a little bit so that it might run under modern Processing versions.

epicdiff is a app suite for creating illustrative and entertaining animations out of docdiff-produced diffs. It was basically written so that I can make an animation out of my NaNoWriMo novel, but you can probably modify it to fit your work flow.

NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED IN THE "ITWORKSFORME®" CONFIGURATION. SOME EXPERTISE AND PROVERBIAL TOUCHING OF POTENTIALLY LIVE WIRES IS REQUIRED. YOU MAY MISS YOUR DEADLINES IF YOU RELY ON THIS THING, AND I'M NOT TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THAT. It might blow up when you try to use it. When the smoke clears, please try to make sense of what went wrong. I regrettably CANNOT guarantee that I will be able to provide personal assistance on how to use this program to achieve your goals; you may instead want to go and learn a bit of Ruby and Processing instead. It's more fun that way! I also cannot guarantee this hack is constantly developed; I may update it in future, however, when I actually need it, and in those cases, try not to strip away any of the functionality that is already present and will only add new options.

License

The animation software itself, found in this repository, is distiributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3. See "COPYING".

Other components included here:

• The included "Anonymous Pro" font, by Mark Simonson, is distributed under the Open Font License. See data/AnonymousPro.*.txt.

Dependencies

Animation software

• Java SE JRE Last tested with Sun Java 6 (1.6.0_20-b02) under Linux.
• Processing This is built in Processing 1.2.1. If you experience weird syntax errors, get the newest version. Apparently there has been some big changes recently.
• GSVideo Please download the appropriate version and unzip it in "libraries" folder under your Processing sketchbook folder, as instructed by the Helpful Documentation. Tested with Linux library version 0.7 and fairly freshish GStreamer in Debian Unstable.

(MAINTENANCE NOTE: As stated, these versions are ancient. GSVideo in particular is exceedingly obsolete, as the video facility in Processing 2+ is based on it and included by default.)

Conversion tool and gitsplode

You probably need some sort of POSIX userland. The tools require the regular wc(1) tool, and gitsplode also needs Git, obviously. I have not tried to run these under Windows but these probably should be possible to be ported to run.

• Ruby
  • RMagick gem install rmagick
• DocDiff
• wkhtmltopdf

Workflow

The workflow with the animation goes like this:

• Produce a list of files from my Git repository, using "gitsplode.rb" tool (found in my github repository). This will also generate some of the data for the animation in form of an XML file.
• IMPORTANT: Make sure the files are presentable to docdiff. To wit, convert the files to the same line ending format. docdiff is able to figure out that the files have different types of line endings, but for reasons best known to the goddess ever-watchful, is not able to proceed with the comparison, even with that insight in hand. So, you should make sure all of the files have the same kinds of file endings. This could be a problem if you've worked on alternating platforms like Windows and *nix, and you've set Git to not automatically convert the line endings. If you've worked on only one platform, congratulations, you may be good to go.
• Produce the data used by the animator application, using tellthetale.rb Ruby program:
  • Produce HTML-format diff visualisations using docdiff
  • Convert the HTML to PDF using wkhtmltopdf
  • analyse, resize and convert the pages using RMagick
  • Produce yet another damn XML file with more summary data. Why make one XML file when you can make two 😄
• Slurp the XML summary and image files from individual pages in the Processing program, which will clearly animate the resulting pages and hopefully produce a nice little video file.

gitsplode

The gitsplode.rb script feebly attempts to exports the entire history of a single file from a Git repository. "Feebly attempts to", because *ahem* Git's notion of single file identity is what it is.

This was mostly made to assist me in researching how my writing projects are proceeding (i.e. "In (date) my word count was (x)"), and I tend to keep those projects in single files as much as possible, so if your use case diverts too much from that, you'll luck will probably run out.

The program will spit out each revision in a file that is named after the commit date, and also spits out an XML summary file (summary.xml) that is pretty much self-explanatory:

<commitdata>
    <commit>
        <filename>foo.1234_56_78.12_34_56.txt</filename>
        <date unix="123456">Thursday of Human-Readable Date Whenever</date>
        <message>This is a commit message and stuff...</message>
    </commit>
    <!-- ... -->
</commitdata>