My workflow with gitdags

As I wrote in my last post, I like to use the LaTeX package gitdags when a visual representation of an exemplary git graph is needed.

In this post, I shortly show my workflow when creating these graphs.

\documentclass[preview]{standalone}

\usepackage{gitdags}

\begin{document}
    \centering
    \begin{tikzpicture}
      % Commit DAG
      \gitDAG[grow right sep = 2em]{
        A -- B -- C
      };
    \end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

produces this graph

The import thing to note here is the chosen documentclass which crops the resulting pdf to be as big as the content.

\documentclass[preview]{standalone}

When running pdflatex graph.tex you would get such a pdf. To convert the pdf into a png, I use ImageMagick. On a Mac, it’s as easy to get as to type

$ brew install imagemagick

Then, for converting the pdf into png, use ImageMagicks convert method.

$ convert graph.pdf graph.png

I wrote a small bash script which lets me specify input and ouput directories, does the conversion from tex to png and later throws away all pdf generation files.

A Makefile would probably be much better as it would only build files which changed, not the whole directory. As for now, I will stick with the bash script given that the amount of files is rather small. If I ever switch to Make, I’ll update this post accordingly.