Moving thumbnails

Question

I once saw a document with pictures in the top corner. If you rapidly thumb thru the document the pictures appear to move. Is there a way to put a series of thumbnails in the top corner of a document?

Answer 1

You can place figures, according to page number. I simply saved the first Google image result to the queries pretty image 1,2,... in the folder of the .tex file, named them 1.jpg, 2.jpg,... and ran:

\documentclass[paper=a6,pagesize]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\rhead{\includegraphics[height=0.6cm]{\thepage}}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\lipsum\pagebreak
\end{document}

The result is shown below. With the proper pictures you can achieve your comic strip animation.
If you want the images really really in the corner (watch out for overlay with the thumb), you can use the following code.

\documentclass[paper=a6,pagesize]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{tikz}
\rhead{\tikz[overlay,remember picture]\node at (current page.north east) [anchor=north east] {\includegraphics[height=0.6cm]{\thepage}};}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\lipsum\pagebreak
\end{document}

Answer 2

Here's another possibility using the background package (I assumed the images files are called image-1, image-2,...):

\documentclass[paper=a6,pagesize]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{background}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\backgroundsetup{
  angle=0,
  position=current page.north east,
  hshift=-10pt,
  vshift=-10pt,
  scale=1,
  color=black,
  opacity=1,
  contents={\includegraphics[width=20pt]{image-\thepage}}
}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
\lipsum
\end{document}

Rereading the question, it is natural that the images must appear only on odd-numbered pages for a two-sided document; this can also be easily achieved with the background package.

Assuming once again that the images are called image-1, image-2,... then image-k must appear on page 2k-1 so some arithmetic has to be done; for this, I used the \dividecounter macro proposed by egreg in his answer to design a macro that replaces \divide:

\documentclass[paper=a6,pagesize]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{background}
\usepackage{ifthen}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{calc}

\backgroundsetup{
  angle=0,
  position=current page.north east,
  hshift=-10pt,
  vshift=-10pt,
  scale=1,
  color=black,
  opacity=1,
  contents={}
}

\newcounter{imagenumb}
\newcommand\dividecounter[2]{%
  \global\divide\csname c@#1\endcsname#2\relax}

\AddEverypageHook{%
  \setcounter{imagenumb}{\numexpr\thepage+1\relax}
  \dividecounter{imagenumb}{2}
  \ifthenelse{\isodd{\thepage}}%
    {\backgroundsetup{contents={\includegraphics[width=20pt]{image-\theimagenumb}}}%
    {}%
  \BgMaterial}%
}

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1-12]
\end{document}