• 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.

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 --no-fonts myAnim.dvi % or myAnim.xdv
  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

  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.