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Formatting git changelogs for LaTeX

Most of the things I write, be it software or something else, are under revision control with git. Mostly because it makes undoing mistakes easy. My LaTeX documents are no exception. With software it is customary to have a change-log (like the one generated by the git log command). I wanted to do something similar for LaTeX.

The easiest way to do that would probably be to save the git log output to a file and include that with a \verbatimfile command from the verbatimfiles package. But that would look pretty ugly.

So I decided to write a program that parses the output of the git log command and format it using a tabular environment. The listing of this program is given below, but you can also download it.

This is some git log output:

And this is wat it looks like after mkhistory.py has done its job and the resulting LaTeX code has been processed into a pdf: