While babysitting my kids yesterday I played little bit with one of my favorite LaTeX package PSTricks
. Naturally I started toying with something more "advanced" so a toyed a bit with animations. On PSTricks
website I learned about animate package. To expend further on the topic I also read a PracTEX Journal, 2010, No. 1. article, Tools for creating LATEX-integrated graphics and animations under GNU/Linux. Long story short 2 hours latter I came up with the following conclusions.
Including animations into
pdf
files as oppose to using external files and external media players should be preferable approach in handling animations in presentations at least when it comes to portability.I like the idea of using external scripting language to do actual animations in
pdf
files instead of generatingpdf
files of enormous size.Animate takes the right approach but it fails short to deliver for two reasons. It requires Adobe Reader which is essentially Windows specific application. I am an
OpenBSD
user and the obsolete 7.0 version of LinuxAcroRead
which I can get to work via Linux emulation layer is compiled without required JavaScript. Why JavaScript? Since I do not actually useAcroRead
my guess is that that is probably the only language it is supported.
Here is my question. Does anybody knows enough about internals of animate
package to tell me how easily would be to replace JavaScript with Lua
:) Second question for xpdf
(or other pdf
viewers based on different pdf
rendering libraries like mupdf
or epdfview
) hackers is how easily would be to add Lua
support in xpdf
. Advantage of "my" approach should be obvious.
I would like to thank Dr. Herber Voss for doing a great job with PSTricks
. The only really useful thing for humanity which came out of my goofing of with PSTricks
yesterday and animate package is that I ordered his book PSTricks: Graphics and PostScript for TeX and LaTeX for our university library.
animate
is lacking features but it's because only AcroRead has the abilities to pull of those tricks. And it's not Windows specific. as far as I know.