# How can I display a frame counter for a slide show created using the animate package?

Within my larger pdf document I have what is basically a slideshow that steps through a set of frames created using the animateinline environment. I would like to add a frame counter of the form "Frame 12 of 32".

I can imagine two possible approaches:

• When the frames are created by the animate package, if there was a LaTeX counter available that corresponded to the frame number then it could be simply displayed as part of that frame.
• Or, when the frames are being played back, have some javascript which updates a frame counter displayed somewhere on the page. I know from the animate documentation that I can get or set the frame number but don't know how to display and update this info.

The following example uses animate-internal counters and a macro to write information (frame count) into the aux file. This corresponds to the first of your suggested approaches. The counter is inserted using the \framecounter command.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{animate}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% \framecounter %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Within animateinline', inserts curr. #frame / total #frame'.
\makeatletter
\newcommand\framecounter{%
\edef\the@frame{\the\numexpr\@anim@curframe@zb+1\relax}%
\@anim@keytoaux{a\the\@anim@num.last}{\the@frame}%
\framebox[\widthof{%
-\@anim@getkeyval{a\the\@anim@num.last}/%
\@anim@getkeyval{a\the\@anim@num.last}-%
}]{\strut\the@frame/\@anim@getkeyval{a\the\@anim@num.last}}%
}
\makeatother
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\newcommand\mybox[1]{\framebox[\widthof{-jumps-}]{\strut#1}}

\begin{document}

\begin{animateinline}[
step,
end=\framecounter %insert at the end of every frame
]{1}
\mybox{The}
\newframe
\mybox{quick}
\newframe
\mybox{brown}
\newframe
\mybox{fox}
\newframe
\mybox{jumps}
\newframe
\mybox{over}
\newframe
\mybox{the}
\newframe
\mybox{lazy}
\newframe
\mybox{dog.}
\end{animateinline}

\end{document}

• Excellent. Just what I needed. Sorry I can't vote up your answer but this is my first foray into tex.stackexchange and I don't have enough points to do so. – Paul Rippon Mar 18 '15 at 21:51