The making of a thesis

This project goes through my thesis repository, extracts some data from the .tex files (word count, character count, number of sections, etc), compiles the pdfs, converts each pdf page into an image, then combines everything into a frame. The frames themselves have to be joined together later with another tool. I used DaVinci Resolve.

I did this because it seemed fun. I wrote a bit more about what went on my mind here

I created two movies, one fast and one slow. They can be found on YouTube.

• https://youtu.be/jKUw8FVsJxE (fast)
• https://youtu.be/o8FFMAszz5s (slow)

Running the script

First, you must clone this repository with git clone https://github. com/KarlClinckspoor/EvolutionThesis.git, or click on the green Code button, then Download ZIP, then extract the ZIP file.

Then, you need a repository with a thesis, like mine. Once again, run git clone https://github. com/KarlClinckspoor/Tese.git, or download the ZIP. It is recommended to place this at the same parent folder as the other repository.

Edit the file config.py to point to the absolute/relative path of the thesis repository. Here you can also change the names of the directories the temporary output files will be placed. My names are horribly nondescriptive.

The file main.py contains the main entry point to this script. It is very simple, and just points to other functions that do the brunt of the work.

If the script hangs up when compiling the .tex files, go to latex_manip.py and change the line compile_pdf_from_sha(commit["sha"], repo, verbose=False) to compile_pdf_from_sha(commit["sha"], repo, verbose=True). This will show the LaTeX compilation output and let you recognize some possible problems.

This works fine in (Manjaro) Linux. I had some problems running this in Windows, because of complicated dependency installs and some issues with pathlib, PosixPath I'm not going to fix, so I recommend using a Linux VM (or perhaps WSL). I don't know how compatible this is with MacOS, haven't tested.

Requirements:

LaTeX

This requirement is for my thesis itself. I compiled it with XeLaTeX (TeXLive 2020, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.999992). pdfLaTeX won't work because my thesis uses fontspec. It also requires the Latin Modern Fonts. Download them (Roman, Sans and Mono) and check the method appropriate to your OS to install them.

pdftoppm

This script uses the tool pdftoppm. It is part of the poppler project. On Windows, it comes with MikTeX, or you can install with Chocolatey or using conda install -c conda-forge poppler. On Linux, you can get it by installing poppler-utils (Ubuntu) or poppler (Manjaro). On Mac, you can install it with Homebrew (brew install poppler) or conda.

Python

The entire script is written in Python. I used the Anaconda 2020.11 that I installed using pyenv on my Manjaro Linux system. The packages I used are in the requirements.txt file.

I had some problems trying to reproduce my python install. Anaconda environments worked fine, but "pure" python installs with pip install -r requirements.txt did not. I tried creating a virtual environment of "pure" Python 3.9.0 and 3.8.4, pip installed the requirements. There would be problems when creating the wordcloud, with varying messages, such as segmentation faults and corrupted size vs prev_size, munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer. Using conda solved the problem, though.

The following process worked for me. I recommend using venv, pipenv, virtualenvwrapper, pyenv or stuff like that, because it makes resetting and testing other stuff much easier.

1. Install miniconda or anaconda (e.g. pyenv install anaconda3-2020.11)
2. (Optional) Create a virtual environment of this install (e.g. pyenv virtualenv evolutionthesis anaconda3-2020.11)
3. (Possibly optional) Activate the environment (e.g. pyenv local anaconda3-2020.11 or pyenv local evolutionthesis)
4. Check the python version (python --version). If it's 3.9+, downgrade it to 3.8.0 or 3.8.5 with conda install python=3.8.5. If you're not using a virtual environment or pyenv, then I recommend creating a conda env, conda create --name condaenv python=3.8.5 pip.
5. Install the requirements with conda install -c conda-forge --file requirements.txt. It might take a while. It only complained about incompatibilities if my python version was 3.9+.

Then run main.py. If there's something wrong with your install, it will probably hang up when creating to frames of the movie (specifically when calling wordcloud).

Licensing

You can use and modify the code here to your heart's content. I would appreciate being thanked or contacted, if someone decides to use this. Don't try to sell anything you create with this. I don't think anyone would buy, and it also wouldn't be very cool (unless you asked for permission beforehand).