[Tex/LaTex] Using the animate package without Adobe

animatebeamerviewers

I'm looking to use the animate package in beamer to display animated graphics to my class, and I was wondering if it'd be possible for the animation to work on their Chromebooks. It seems Adobe isn't supported on ChromeOS, so is there any other alternative?

This question seems relevant, but I don't have any movie files or gifs, just what I've made using the animate package in LaTeX.

I understand this is quite likely not possible, but any help would be much appreciated.

Best Answer

1 `beamer` class document in SVG format

Think about giving up the PDF format in favour of SVG.

Animations run in all contemporary Web browsers, while Blink-based ones (Chromium, Chrome, Opera) have the best performance. Also run on mobile devices.

Click the image to start presentation in the Web browser and press F11 for full-screen. Navigate through slides with PgUp and PgDown.

Compile the example code with

latex svgbeamer
latex svgbeamer
dvisvgm --font-format=woff2 --bbox=papersize --zoom=-1 -p1,- --output=%f-%1p svgbeamer

Example code svgbeamer.tex:

\documentclass[dvisvgm,hypertex,aspectratio=169]{beamer}
\usefonttheme{serif}

\usepackage{animate}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% PageDown, PageUp key event handling; navigation symbols
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\usepackage[totpages]{zref}
\usepackage{atbegshi}
\usepackage{fontawesome}
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\AtBeginShipout{%
  \AtBeginShipoutAddToBox{%
    \special{dvisvgm:raw
      <defs>
      <script type="text/javascript">
      <![CDATA[
        document.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){
          if(e.key=='PageDown'){
            \ifnum\thepage<\ztotpages
              document.location.replace('\jobname-\the\numexpr\thepage+1\relax.svg');%
            \fi
          }else if(e.key=='PageUp'){
            \ifnum\thepage>1
              document.location.replace('\jobname-\the\numexpr\thepage-1\relax.svg');%
            \fi%
          }
        });
      ]]>
      </script>
      </defs>
    }%
  }%
  \AtBeginShipoutUpperLeftForeground{%
    \raisebox{-\dimexpr\height+0.5ex\relax}[0pt][0pt]{\makebox[\paperwidth][r]{%
      \normalsize\color{structure!40!}%
      \ifnum\thepage>1%
        \href{\jobname-\the\numexpr\thepage-1\relax.svg}{\faArrowLeft}%
      \else%  
        \textcolor{lightgray}{\faArrowLeft}%  
      \fi\hspace{0.5ex}%
      \ifnum\thepage<\ztotpages%
        \href{\jobname-\the\numexpr\thepage+1\relax.svg}{\faArrowRight}%
      \else%
        \textcolor{lightgray}{\faArrowRight}%  
      \fi%
      \hspace{0.5ex}%
    }}%
  }%  
}%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%required by PSTricks example
\usepackage[dvipsnames,svgnames]{pstricks}
\usepackage{pst-node,pst-plot,pst-eucl}
\usepackage{pst-solides3d}
\usepackage{multido}
\usepackage[nomessages]{fp}

\title{Using package \emph{animate} without Adobe}
\subtitle{Use a Web browser and press \framebox{F11}}
\author{AlexG}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\frame{\titlepage}

\begin{frame}{Animation}
  trivial example
  \begin{center}
    \begin{animateinline}[controls]{2}
      \multiframe{10}{i=0+1}{\Huge\fbox{\i}}
    \end{animateinline}  
  \end{center}
\end{frame}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%  PSTricks example by J. Gilg
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\def\R{4}            % Radius des festen Kreises (Length fixed Circle)  
\def\r{1}            % Radius des abrollenden Kreises (Length rolling Circle)
\def\A{0.75}         % Abstand erzeugenden Punkt zu Mittelpunkt des abrollenden Kreises (Length Pointer)
\def\winkel{360}     % Winkel: 1 Umlauf entspricht 360 (Angle: 1 revolution corresponds to 360)
\FPdiv{\myDeltaA}{\winkel}{90}%

\def\psBall{\rput(0,0){\psSolid[
  object=sphere,r=0.35,
  hue=0 1,
  RotX=\ai\space,ngrid=12](0,0,0)}}

\def\myFigure{%
  \pstVerb{% erzeugender Punkt (parameterized Hypocycloide)
    /Xcoord \ai\space cos \R\space \r\space sub mul \ai\space \R\space \r\space sub \r\space div mul cos \A\space mul add def % (R-r)cos(a)+A cos[(R/r-1) a]
    /Ycoord \ai\space sin \R\space \r\space sub mul \ai\space \R\space \r\space sub \r\space div mul sin \A\space mul sub def % (R-r)sin(a)-A sin[(R/r-1) a]
  }%

  % erzeugender Punkt (generating point)
  \rput(0,0){\rput(!Xcoord Ycoord){\psBall}}%

  \rput(0,0){\psSolid[object=cube,ngrid=4,
     hue=0 1,
     hollow,
     a=0.5,
     RotZ=-\ai\space](0,0,0)%
  }
}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\begin{frame}[t]{PSTricks Animation}
At the end of a rainbow \dots, by Jürgen Gilg.
\begin{itemize}
  \item best viewed in Blink-based browsers, such as Chromium, Chrome, Opera
  \item frame rate printed to JavaScript console (Ctrl+Shift+I)
\end{itemize}
\begin{center}
  \raisebox{0pt}[0.65\height][0pt]{%
  \pstVerb{/clip {} def}% disable `clip' for much better SVG performance in Firefox
  \begin{animateinline}[measure,loop,controls,height=0.8\textheight]{30}
  \multiframe{90}{i=0+1}{%
    \FPeval{ai}{myDeltaA*\i}%
    \begin{pspicture}(-5,-5)(5,5)\myFigure\end{pspicture}%
  }%
  \end{animateinline}%
}
\end{center}
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
  \begin{center}\Huge The End\end{center}  
\end{frame}

\end{document}

2 Animated SVG as file attachment to PDF

animate can export to standalone SVG animations, as outlined in https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/136919 . The SVG can be embedded as a file attachment to the PDF, and be run in a Web browser on click or touch:

\usepackage{attachfile} % or attachfile2
...
\textattachfile{animatedImage.svg}{Click!}

or without being attached:

\usepackage{hyperref}
...
\href{run:animatedImage.svg}{Click!}

In either case, the operating system/window manager must be configured to use a Web browser as default application for opening SVG files.

Chromium-based Web browsers (e. g. Chrome, Opera) should be used for viewing animated SVG, because of their extremely good rendering performance. The Lorenz attractor may serve as a test example.

3 As for PDF, ...

... there is very good news! Open-Source PDF viewers are catching up.

Okular from KDE now supports JavaScript-driven animations. See:

https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2019/StatusReports/Jo%C3%A3oNetto

Tested with Okular-1.10 (KDE-20.04.1)

We need an opensource PDF viewer with an opensource JavaScript engine added. All ingredients are there, e.g. Evince, Okular, JavaScriptCore from webkit.org (used by Apples web browser Safari), V8 (Google Chrome) or SpiderMonkey (Firefox).

MuPDF is a good starting point, but its integrated JavaScript support is quite rudimentary.

And the PDF rendering performance should be high, which is crucial for animations. MuPDF is one rendering library. The other two, Okular, Evince are based on the Poppler library.

The faster one, either MuPDF or Poppler should be chosen.

Someone should take up the challenge and put everything together.

What makes a PDF with working animations no longer work?

There are 3 cases that will make working animations in a PDF file NO longer work. For simplicity, let animation.pdf be the PDF file with working animations.

We compress animation.pdf with gswin64c -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=animation-compressed.pdf animation.pdf.
We crop animation.pdf with pdfcrop animation.pdf animation-cropped.pdf.
We import animation.pdf from within a LaTeX input file by using \includegraphics{animation.pdf}.

`\animateinline` versus `\animategraphics`

Recall that we cannot embed a PDF with animation into another document as what AlexG said, we have two options to solve your problem. Just choose one of the following.

Use animateinline environment to sandwich your animation codes, and put the environment into your host input file (which is an input file with beamer document class in your case). However this approach has 3 drawbacks: (a) you cannot use pdflatex to compile your host input file when the animation codes in PSTricks language. (b) your host input file contains both text and codes so it become long, crowded, hard-to-understand, difficult to maintain, etc, (c) compilation will take longer time because the animation codes get recompiled whenever you make any changes. That is why I suggest you to do the second option below.
Use \animategraphics instead of animateinline. \animategraphics allows you to import any PDF with one or more pages to be animated.

The theory is enough. Now the following will explain the second option (using \animategraphics). There are 2 steps as follows:

Solution

In my opinion, it will be better if you cut the animation code from the host input file (presentation with beamer in your case ) and paste the animation code into a single, TeXable input file. TeX the animation input file to produce a PDF output. Later, you can make use of this PDF to create many other projects such as GIF animation, PDF animation (in your case), PNG images, etc. This separation method also make your host input file neater, cleaner, readable, understandable, etc.

Let Simple.tex be the TeXable animation input file as follows:

%Simple.tex  using standalone document class

\documentclass[pstricks,border=0pt]{standalone}
\usepackage{pstricks-add}

\newcommand\RotatingArrow[1]{%
    \begin{pspicture}(-1,-1)(10,11)
        \psframe*[linecolor=cyan,opacity=0.3](-1,-1)(10,11)
        \psset{arrows=->}
        \psaxes(0,0)(-0.5,-0.5)(9,10)[$x$,0][$y$,90]
        \rput(4.5,0.6){\Huge{Temps = #1 s}}
        \rput{#1}(4.5,5.5){%
            \psset{arrowsize=5pt}
            \pnode(2,0){A}
            \pnode(2,3){B}
            \psline[linecolor=blue](A)
            \uput[0]{-#1}(A){\Huge{$\textcolor{blue}{\vec{a}}$}}
            \psline[linecolor=red](A)(B)
            \uput[90]{-#1}(B){\Huge{$\textcolor{red}{\vec{v}}$}}
        }
\end{pspicture}} 

\begin{document} 
    \multido{\i=0+10}{36}{\RotatingArrow{\i}}
\end{document}

For those who are unlucky to use standalone document class, the last resort is to use preview as follows. Note that standalone also uses preview internally.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pstricks-add}


\usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewBorder=0pt
\PreviewEnvironment{pspicture}


\newcommand\RotatingArrow[1]{%
    \begin{pspicture}(-1,-1)(10,11)
        \psframe*[linecolor=cyan,opacity=0.3](-1,-1)(10,11)
        \psset{arrows=->}
        \psaxes(0,0)(-0.5,-0.5)(9,10)[$x$,0][$y$,90]
        \rput(4.5,0.6){\Huge{Temps = #1 s}}
        \rput{#1}(4.5,5.5){%
            \psset{arrowsize=5pt}
            \pnode(2,0){A}
            \pnode(2,3){B}
            \psline[linecolor=blue](A)
            \uput[0]{-#1}(A){\Huge{$\textcolor{blue}{\vec{a}}$}}
            \psline[linecolor=red](A)(B)
            \uput[90]{-#1}(B){\Huge{$\textcolor{red}{\vec{v}}$}}}
\end{pspicture}}

\begin{document}
    \multido{\i=0+10}{36}{\RotatingArrow{\i}}
\end{document}

TeX it with either xelatex or latex->dvips->ps2pdf to get a PDF file. In our example, it will contain 36 pages to create a simple animation as follows.

enter image description here

Now, you create the beamer as follows.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{animate}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}{Circular motion in action}
\animategraphics[autoplay,loop,scale=0.5]{10}{Simple}{}{} % WARNING: the filename must not include its extension!
\end{frame}
\end{document}

TeX it with either pdflatex (recommended) or xelatex. And the following image shows your presentation with a working animation.

The latest edit

We can also combine both input files into single input file as follows. Compile it with pdflatex --shell-escape.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{filecontents}

%====================== BEGIN FILE CONTENTS ==========================
\begin{filecontents*}{dummy.tex}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pstricks-add}

\usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewBorder=0pt
\PreviewEnvironment{pspicture}

\newcommand\RotatingArrow[1]{%
    \begin{pspicture}(-1,-1)(10,11)
        \psframe*[linecolor=cyan,opacity=0.3](-1,-1)(10,11)
        \psset{arrows=->}
        \psaxes(0,0)(-0.5,-0.5)(9,10)[$x$,0][$y$,90]
        \rput(4.5,0.6){\Huge{Temps = #1 s}}
        \rput{#1}(4.5,5.5){%
            \psset{arrowsize=5pt}
            \pnode(2,0){A}
            \pnode(2,3){B}
            \psline[linecolor=blue](A)
            \uput[0]{-#1}(A){\Huge{$\textcolor{blue}{\vec{a}}$}}
            \psline[linecolor=red](A)(B)
            \uput[90]{-#1}(B){\Huge{$\textcolor{red}{\vec{v}}$}}}
\end{pspicture}}

\begin{document}
    \multido{\i=0+10}{36}{\RotatingArrow{\i}}
\end{document}
\end{filecontents*}
%====================== END FILE CONTENTS =========================

\usepackage{animate}
\begin{document}
\immediate\write18{latex dummy}
\immediate\write18{dvips dummy}
\immediate\write18{ps2pdf dummy.ps}
\begin{frame}{Circular motion in action}
    \animategraphics[controls,scale=0.5]{10}{dummy}{}{}
\end{frame}
\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] animate does not animate files in beamer although compilation works

Different AR versions seem to behave differently with regard to PageOpen/PageVisible events which are used to initialise the animation. Some fire the latter, others the former when a page is navigated to in AR.

Un update [2016/02/28] which evaluates both events, such that none of them is missed, is on the way to CTAN.

Best Answer

1 beamer class document in SVG format

2 Animated SVG as file attachment to PDF

3 As for PDF, ...

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to include a PSTricks animation into a beamer