[Tex/LaTex] ny way to include an animated GIF directly

animationsgifpdftexxetex

Is there any way to include an animated GIF directly in either PDFLaTeX or XeLaTeX? I realize the animate package can include animations in a PDF, but it doesn't support animated GIFs and you have to split them up manually into EPS or PNG files as far as I can tell.

Best Answer

Yes, use the movie15 package (in Latex), which supports GIFs directly. You will need to use a PDF viewer that has the right plugin to supported GIF animations.

Note on media9

The movie15 package has been marked deprecated on CTAN for some time in favour of the media9 package, because media9 uses the better supported approach to embedding media of Adobe's Rich Media Annotations, rather than the old, ad-hoc, plug-in based approach of movie15. This has the consequence that building rich media documents in media9 is a more flexible process, supporting several workflows, and the results typically can be displayed with more viewers. However, media9 does not support animated GIFs - the GIFs would have to be converted to a supported format such as FLV or MP4 before embedding.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Animation in PDF presentations, without Adobe Reader

As discussed in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2428372/insert-video-clip-in-a-lyx-presentation-and-play-it-in-gnu-linux, you can use the multimedia package to embed movies (mpg, mp4) in a way that you can play them in Okular. Minimal example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multimedia}
\begin{document}
\movie[height = 0.6 \textwidth,width = 1.0 \textwidth]{}{animation.mpg}
\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] Convert GIF image to PNG on the fly

You need to enable shell escapes. With MiKTeX you do -enable-write18 and with TeXlive -shell-escape.

You can set up different conversion rules with the epstopdf package

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{epstopdf}
\epstopdfDeclareGraphicsRule
  {.gif}{png}{.png}{convert gif:\SourceFile.\SourceExt png:\OutputFile}
\AppendGraphicsExtensions{.gif}


\begin{document}

\includegraphics{test.gif}

\end{document}

Using epstopdf you can control if the conversion should be done every time you compile or only if the target file is missing.

Best Answer

Note on media9

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Animation in PDF presentations, without Adobe Reader

[Tex/LaTex] Convert GIF image to PNG on the fly

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