Twelve long documents, and two thousand short ones

Twelve long documents, and two thousand short ones

Each collection's documents drawn as a range: the shortest, the median and the longest. Every collection in this field until now has been the top three rows — a dozen documents of about twelve thousand characters each, which is what a version history of one file looks like. A real collection of 2,214 figure captions has a median of 230 characters and a spread of 7.4 between its ends. Everything a listing structure costs depends on which of these two shapes it is built over, and nothing in this collection had ever been measured on the second.

Drawn at 700 × 364, wide on the page. Everything above is what many-documents returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

6 essays call many-documents. 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.