Real documents are not the same length

Real documents are not the same length

Each bar is one document. The version history's ten revisions run from 1,086 to 4,079 characters and grow monotonically, because a file that is edited across ten versions mostly gets longer. The eight source modules vary by 3.12x. The twelve essays vary by only 1.26x, and that is the one uniformity here that is genuinely an artefact: they come from a collection that requires every essay to sit inside a length band. A generated collection matched to any of them has 12 documents of exactly 2,048 characters each, every time.

Drawn at 700 × 430, wide on the page. Everything above is what real-corpus returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

5 essays call real-corpus. 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.