Exporting animation created with animate package

Question

Consider the following minimal working example.
It's great to have an animation in pdf format.
But sometimes it would be good to be able to export it into an animated gif or something else (swf, video file, svg?).
How do I achieve this?
Note: I often have animations together with pgfplots.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{animate}

\usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewEnvironment{animateinline}

\begin{document}

\begin{center}
\fboxsep1mm
    \begin{animateinline}[autoplay,loop]{2}
    a
    \newframe    
    b
    \newframe  
    c                 
    \end{animateinline}
\end{center}

\end{document}

Remark

The animation is not visible in all PDF viewers. It surely works with a current Adobe Reader.

See my answer that can produce many output format in one click. — kiss my armpit, Oct 12 '13 at 15:14

AlexG · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-03T14:00:23.223

32

1 Animated SVG (`animate` `[2018/11/20]`)

suitable for inclusion in Web pages (or viewed standalone, also on mobile devices)
freely scalable (vectorial graphics)
relies on M. Gieseking's dvisvgm output driver/utility (available in TeXLive and MikTeX)

compile with

latex myAnim.tex % or lualatex --output-format=dvi or xelatex --no-pdf
dvisvgm --exact --font-format=woff --zoom=-1 myAnim.dvi % or myAnim.xdv

myAnim.tex:

    \documentclass[dvisvgm,12pt]{article}
    \usepackage{animate}
    \pagestyle{empty}

    \begin{document}\Huge
    \begin{center}

      \begin{animateinline}[controls,buttonsize=0.5em,autoplay,loop]{2}
        \multiframe{10}{i=0+1}{
          \framebox[1em]{\i}
        }
        \newframe
          \framebox[1em]{A}
        \newframe
          \framebox[1em]{B}
        \newframe
          \framebox[1em]{C}
        \newframe
          \framebox[1em]{D}
        \newframe
          \framebox[1em]{E}
        \newframe
          \framebox[1em]{F}
      \end{animateinline}

    \end{center}
    \end{document}

embed into HTML with the <object> tag

<object type="image/svg+xml" data="myAnim.svg">
  <!-- fallback & search engine indexing -->
  <img src="myAnim.svg" />
</object>

The Chromium Web browser and those derived from it (Chrome, Opera, ...) have by far the best rendering performance, as can be tested with the Lorenz attractor example.

2 Export to multipage PDF (`animate` `[2018/08/22]`)

As of version [2018/08/22], animate has the package option export, to be used together with the standalone document class, as in:

\documentclass[export]{standalone}
\usepackage{animate}

or

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage[export]{animate}

Animation frames are output as individual pages of a multipage document, suitable for conversion to other file formats, such as animated GIF, using external programs, such as convert from ImageMagick.org:

convert -density 300 -delay 4 -loop 0 -alpha remove multipage.pdf animated.gif

creates an animated GIF at 100/4=25 frames per second.

edited Jan 03 '19 at 14:00

answered Oct 08 '13 at 07:10

AlexG

54,894

Thanks! Is was hoping for a way that doesn't include changing the internal code of the animate package. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Oct 08 '13 at 20:55
Apparently there is no 'easy' alternative to your approach. Thanks for the answer! – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Oct 16 '13 at 11:38
1

I might add some code to animate in the future that detects whether preview was loaded and which then takes the necessary actions. – AlexG Oct 16 '13 at 11:45
Thanks. Looking forward to it. Animate is a great package - I use it a lot. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Oct 16 '13 at 12:11
It's a very old question - I know :). Is the code now part of the official animate package? – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Mar 13 '18 at 19:09
Not yet. But I fixed the code here to make it functional again. – AlexG Mar 13 '18 at 19:18
1

@Dr.ManuelKuehner, thank you for your kind comments!! – AlexG Mar 13 '18 at 21:14
1

@Dr.ManuelKuehner : I updated my answer. – AlexG Aug 24 '18 at 09:17
2

Great! I only can upvote once sadly. I will upvote some other of your answers. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Aug 24 '18 at 15:28
@Dr.ManuelKuehner, you can upvote several comments. :) – alfC Dec 03 '18 at 17:33
@alfC If this would make Alex happy, yes :). – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Dec 03 '18 at 18:35
How to get SVG animation from a PDF with several pages? – Display Name Jan 03 '19 at 14:13
1

dvisvgm (version 2.3.5) contained in TeXLive does not support embedding external PDF, but the upstream version 2.6.1 does. It will very likely be in TeXLive-2019. For now, split-convert the multipage PDF to a numbered set of PS files and use \animategraphics.... – AlexG Jan 03 '19 at 14:18
@GodMustBeCrazy Split-convert multipage PDF input.pdf to output-<#page>.ps with Ghostscript: pdf2ps -sOutputFile=output-%d.ps input.pdf – AlexG Jan 03 '19 at 14:37
This is still a great answer :) – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Feb 08 '20 at 09:46
1

Oh, thanks, Manuel! – AlexG Feb 08 '20 at 10:35

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 24 '21 at 07:32

2

Animated GIFs can be made using wolfram script and latexalpha2wlua.sty (windows, pdflatex, lualatex)

See https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/579254/161015 for a complete answer.

\documentclass{standalone}
\RequirePackage[cache]{latexalpha2wlua} % option cache (faster on the second run) or nocache (recalculate always)
\begin{document}
Produce an animated GIF in current directory
\newcommand{\iplotx}{% 
    Animate[Plot3D[Sin[x*y +a], {x, 0, 6}, {y, 0, 6}], {a, 0, 4}]
}
\wolframonlygif{\iplotx}{animaxvi}  %#2 name of animated gif
\end{document}

In addition

(1) As part of the output an animated gif will remain in the current directory

(2) Put latexalpha2wlua.sty in the same directory of the document or in your local texmf directory.

edited Jan 24 '21 at 07:32

Diaa

9,599

answered Jan 22 '21 at 18:02

Simon Dispa

39,141

Thanks for the follow-up! – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Jan 22 '21 at 22:31
Where is the definition of the command \wolframonlygif? I can't find it in the package file. I think you mean \wolframanimation. – Diaa Jan 24 '21 at 07:35
While digging into the script language I forgot to do the update. Sorry!! It is done now. – Simon Dispa Jan 24 '21 at 10:37
+1 Somehow I forgot to upvote, sorry. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner May 31 '21 at 23:08

Exporting animation created with animate package

2 Answers2

1 Animated SVG (`animate` `[2018/11/20]`)

2 Export to multipage PDF (`animate` `[2018/08/22]`)

Linked

Related

Exporting animation created with animate package

2 Answers2

1 Animated SVG (animate [2018/11/20])

2 Export to multipage PDF (animate [2018/08/22])

Linked

Related

1 Animated SVG (`animate` `[2018/11/20]`)

2 Export to multipage PDF (`animate` `[2018/08/22]`)