Animate animategraphics outputs frames in wrong order

Question

I tried the Asymptote pdfmovie.asy example and the frames came up in the wrong order. I tried numerous other examples, including wheel.asy, and several of my own tests always with the same results. Basically, the frame order is always:

45 frames, 1 to 45: 1, 2, 13, 24, 35, 41 .. 45, 3 .. 12, 14 .. 23, 25 .. 34, 36..40.

This varies with the number of frames, but there is a pattern (shown below). Sample asymptote code to generate x number of frames (up to 45 but easily extended to as large as you want to test):

// Test Media9 Animate.

// Uncomment the following 2 lines to support pdf animations:
usepackage("animate");
settings.tex="pdflatex";

import graph;
import animation;

size(5cm,0);

// Draw axes.
xaxis( L="x", xmin = -1.0, xmax = 1.0, arrow=EndArrow(3));
yaxis( L="y", ymin = -0.2, ymax = 1.2, arrow=EndArrow(3));

// new array
int [] arrayr = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31};//, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39,
//40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45};

animation a;

// Process all radius entries
for(int j=0; j < arrayr.length; ++j)
{
  save();
  label(format("\small r= %d",arrayr[j]),(-.45,.45));  // So I know the frame number.
  a.add(); // Add current picture to animation.
  restore();
}

erase();

// Merge the images into a pdf animation.
label(a.pdf(BBox(0.25cm),delay=250,"controls",multipage=false));

At first I thought it was this code. Then I thought it was animation.asy. But, by saving the pdf files, I'm able to generate the same results with this LaTeX file:

% Try to make Figure 4.
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{animate}

\begin{document}
\animategraphics[controls]{4}{_fig4+}{00}{26}

\end{document}

The pdf files here have the name _fig4+00.pdf through _fig4+26.pdf. I had added the leading zero to see if that was what was causing the problem but it wasn't; this doesn't fix it.

So then I modified Asymptote's animation.asy program to call animate graphics with a timeline file, and built a timeline file to specify the order of the frames. The timeline file for these 27 images looks like:

::0
::1
::10
::11
::12
::13
::14
::15
::16
::17
::18
::19
::2
::20
::21
::22
::23
::24
::25
::26
::3
::4
::5
::6
::7
::8
::9

And in the tex file above, changed the line to:

\animategraphics[controls,timeline=_fig4.tl]{4}{_fig4+}{00}{26}

and this works correctly.

So I can work around the problem by changing Asymptote's animation.asy file:

// animation delay is in milliseconds
real animationdelay=50; // original line 9
string ftimename;       // [CW fix]
...
ftimename = prefix +".tl";             // [CW fix]
for(int i=0; i < fits.length; ++i) {   // original line 105
...
// [CW fix; autoload a timeline file to fix PDF ordering error]
//    string s="\animategraphics["+options+"]{"+format("%.18f",1000/delay,"C")+
string s="\animategraphics["+options+**", timeline="+ftimename+"**]{"+format("%.18f",1000/delay,"C")+
  "}{"+basename();    // original line 129

But this really isn't a solution, it's just a work-around. The pattern of frame numbers in the timeline file makes it very clear what the problem is: the frame numbers are being sorted as if they're left-justified ASCII character strings and that's obviously not correct.

Okay, I'm doing this in (arggh) Windows 7, using MinGW (4/26/12), MiKTeX 2.9, with all packages up-to-date (Asymptote v2.21, Animate version 2012/12/06), ImageMagick v6.8.1-10, etc. Basically, everything works okay (well, making mp4 files isn't working but that's another issue); I can use TeXworks, latexmk, biblatex, hyperref, etc. and crank stuff out pretty much as I expect.

Now I can see these examples run on Asymptote's web page. So I create a VirtualBox Debian install (6.0.4), download TeX Live 2012 and install the whole thing. I don't update the packages, so it's Asymptote v2.16, Animate version 2012/05/04, ImageMagick v6.6.0-4, etc. Basically stuff that's 9 months older than what I'm using on Windows. And I try the various examples. And they work just fine.

So there is some difference in how Animate works on Windows as opposed to how it works on Linux. I would be interested in any suggestions as to how this can be fixed. Is it a bug that I should report? Do I have something messed up on my Win PC? I can make the timeline file when I need it to get the output I want, but that just becomes another step that I would rather avoid.

Answer 1

The problem you describe is unrelated to the media9 package, only the animate package is involved in this Asymptote script.

I tried your example with a vanilla TeXLive-2012 on my Linux box, with packages updated using tlmgr update --all, prior to running asy on your code. animate is 6/12/2012, Asymptote is 2.16.

Everything works fine, with r running from 1 to 31.

I also tried an Asymptote-2.21 installation outside TeXLive with the same (correct) result.