# Animation: How to move the position of an equation in a continuous manner?

I want to make equations (or words) to continuously move in a page for a beamer talk. A simple example would be we have "A" on the left margin and "B" on the right margin and then "A" moves towards and below "B" to make the division B/A.

I thought about using the texpos package with the animate package so I did not have everything in a tikz picture. As I never used the animate package I'm looking for similar examples.

At TeXample, the examples I found of animation were about animating pictures and graphs. Here by "animation", all the questions I found mean changing an equation but not its position in a continuous manner.

-

Below I present two options.

## Using the animate package

Here's a simple example, using the animate package. Initially you see "A" and "B" four centimeters apart and at the same height: when you play the animation (Acrobat Reader, please (restriction from animate)), "A" starts moving towards "B", and ends just below "B":

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{animate}
\usepackage{ifthen}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.markings}
\hypersetup{pdfpagemode=FullScreen}

\newcounter{tmp}
\stepcounter{tmp}
\def\Steps{20}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}[fragile]{}
\begin{center}
\begin{animateinline}[loop,poster=first,controls]{2}
\whiledo{\thetmp<\Steps}{%
\begin{tikzpicture}[
decoration={
markings,
mark={
at position \thetmp/(\Steps-1)
with {\node {$A$};}}
}]
\coordinate (start) at (-2,0);
\coordinate (end) at (2,0);
\node at (end) {$B$};
\path[postaction={decorate}]
([yshift=.35ex]start) to[out=-20,in=200] ([yshift=-3ex]end);
\path[use as bounding box] (-3,-3) rectangle (3,3);
\end{tikzpicture}%
\stepcounter{tmp}
\ifthenelse{\thetmp<\Steps}
{\newframe}
{\end{animateinline}\relax}
}
\end{center}
\end{frame}

\end{document}


I don't know how to convert an animation of this kind to be uploaded.

The idea is to place "A" in a \node and to use a decoration (from the decorations.markings library) to make "A" move; the movement is given by changing the at position key for the decoration; the decoration is applied as a postaction to a curved path that ends just below "B".

Increasing the value for \Steps (set initially to 20) the movement will be more "continuous".

To have a visual guide of the path used, you can add draw to the path; i.e., replace

\path[postaction={decorate}]
([yshift=.35ex]start) to[out=-20,in=200] ([yshift=-3ex]end);


with

\path[draw,postaction={decorate}]
([yshift=.35ex]start) to[out=-20,in=200] ([yshift=-3ex]end);


## Using overlay specifications and a \foreach loop

Now the second option using overlay specifications and a loop to "fake" a real animation:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.markings}

\def\Steps{40}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\coordinate (start) at (-3,0);
\coordinate (end) at (3,0);
\node at (end) {$B$};
\foreach \Cont in {1,...,\Steps}
\path<\Cont>[
decoration={
markings,
mark=%
at position \Cont/\Steps
with {\node {A};}
},
postaction={decorate}]
([yshift=0.35ex]start) to[out=-30,in=210] ([yshift=-3ex]end);
\end{tikzpicture}%
\end{center}
\end{frame}

\end{document}


-