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I have just thought that it would be amazing to see LaTex in work while making art.

chejnik
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    Putting \tracingall in the preamble just paints TeX art in the log file :) – percusse May 20 '13 at 16:39
  • The main problem I see is that the PDF as it is being generated is not necessary a valid PDF at all (or at any) intermediate steps. Perhaps one can make Beamer's \pause command inserted at many (when it make sense) intermediate steps. Another way could be to generate many truncated (but valid documents, by closing environment) and script the production of PDFs. Maybe something nice comes from this, maybe it is disappointing. Something different but related that I saw was an archive of versions of a document as it is being typed across many days (I can't find the animation now). – alfC Sep 21 '15 at 18:03
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    I found this: https://github.com/momentofgeekiness/paper2movie and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNENiG7LAnc&feature=youtu.be – alfC Sep 21 '15 at 18:43

1 Answers1

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Some ideas (more or less pointless):

  • Run latex in a debugger, execute step by step and take screenshots. Then put the screenshots together in a movie.

  • Filming the console window during a LaTeX run.

  • A document is generated page by page. Convert to bitmaps to generate a movie. (Perhaps this is interesting for presentations with stepwise slides.)

  • TeX can generate memory statistics for each page (\tracingstats). They can be converted to diagrams to make a movie.

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Perhaps you can make it clearer, which aspects of a LaTeX run do you want to be visualized?

Heiko Oberdiek
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  • It would be interesting to see every step LaTex is making (every millisecond). To see how each letter is placed on the page, the corrections that are done afterwards and to see it all visually as a dynamic page (like a movie). Thank you – chejnik May 22 '13 at 07:36
  • @chejnik A huge series of tutorials could make sense, that explains the many algorithms involved (e.g. reading input, breaking lines/making paragraphs, hyphenation/ligatures, breaking pages, ...). There are books that describe the details, e.g. "The TeXbook" by Donald E. Knuth or "TeX by Topic" by Victor Eijkhout. – Heiko Oberdiek May 22 '13 at 12:00