Nov 112009
Since animation 1.0-9, we will be able to create a PDF document with an animation embedded in it; the function is saveLatex(), and its usage is similar to saveMovie() and saveSWF(): you pass an R expression for creating animations to this function, and this expression will be evaluated in the function; the image frames get recorded by a graphics device. In the end, a LaTeX document is written in a directory, and we can get a PDF document by running pdflatex on the document.

In fact, the key point is the LaTeX package named animate, which can be used to insert image frames into a PDF document to generate an animation. The interface of animations created by this package is quite similar to the HTML animation page by the R package animation, moreover, it also uses JavaScript (in PDF) to animate the image frames.

Here is an example:

library(animation)
oopt = ani.options(interval = 0.1, nmax = 100)
## brownian motion: note the 'loop' option and how to set graphics
#    parameters with 'ani.first'
saveLatex({
    brownian.motion(pch = 21, cex = 5, col = "red", bg = "yellow",
        main = "Demonstration of Brownian Motion")
}, ani.basename = "BM", ani.opts = "controls,loop,width=0.8\\textwidth",
    ani.first = par(mar = c(3, 3, 1, 0.5), mgp = c(2, 0.5, 0),
        tcl = -0.3, cex.axis = 0.8, cex.lab = 0.8, cex.main = 1),
    latex.filename = "brownian.motion.tex")
ani.options(oopt)

Download the demo: Brownian Motion in PDF (205K)

The PDF document will be automatically opened if there is nothing wrong with LaTeX and your PDF viewer; if nothing happened, you can find the PDF document brownian.motion.pdf in the directory ani.options("outdir").

The animation works in Acrobat Reader, and I do not know if other PDF viewers can deal with JavaScript correctly (AFAIK, the default PDF viewer in Mac OS will not). Linux users may need to install acroread.

For those who are curious about the LaTeX source code of the above demo:

> cat(readLines(file.path(ani.options("outdir"), "brownian.motion.tex")),
+     sep = "\n")
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{animate}
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\animategraphics[controls,loop,width=0.8\textwidth]{10}{BM}{0}{99}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

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7 Responses to “Create Animations in PDF Documents Using R”

Comments (7)
  1. yixuan says:

    Cool! But I couldn’t find the saveLatex() function in the latest version under R-Forge… :\ Anything wrong?
    By the way, is it more suitable to use “saveLaTeX()” instead of “saveLatex()”?

    • Yihui Xie says:

      Yes, you are thinking about the same problem as I did. The reason I used saveLatex is that I find R uses toLatex. Actually I rarely write LaTeX as Latex. :grin:

      The source package is on CRAN now. I have not tried R-Forge yet, but I guess the Windows binary package should be on CRAN within one day.

  2. Paul Hewson says:

    This is really great, thanks!
    Paul

  3. zwdbordeaux says:

    Cool!
    I just realized that you posted different poster here than those of your chinese blog. So, I have one more blog to visit now!

  4. zwdbordeaux says:

    I finally tested your codes and succcessfully redraw the sample you provided in this poster. Now I would like to present a dataset of hourly temperature during two months. The idea is to make an animation of the dynamic temperature fluctuation according the hour of a day and the day of a month. I image the code will be more or less like your latest presentation on the data of “HuSpeech”. Then is my question. I would like to know how could we insert the final animation into ppt file? (Please note that I am not familar with LaTex.)
    Thank you for your help in advance!

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