The depth profile of a real version history

The depth profile of a real version history

Every position of ten revisions of one file — 75,658 characters — placed at the number of copies an extraction has to follow to produce it. The shape is a bell with a peak at 6, holding 18.4% of the collection, and a thin tail out to 14. Drawn behind it is twelve unrelated essays, which is not a version history and has no generations of copying at all: its mean depth is 5.17 against this one's 5.71. Whatever produces depth in real text is mostly not what the cap ladder was about, because it is here in full when generations are absent.

Drawn at 700 × 420, wide on the page. Everything above is what depth-profile returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

4 essays call depth-profile. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.