[pdftex] pdftex Digest, Vol 57, Issue 13

[James A. Bednar]

|  Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:51:14 +0100
|  From: Alexander Grahn <A.Grahn at fzd.de>
|  Subject: Re: [pdftex] Looping presentations inside another document
|  
|  On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 04:18:59PM +0100, Hartmut Henkel wrote:
|  >
|  >never played with animate, but i wonder why the splitting step is
|  >needed? the \pdfximage has page as optional parameter, like \pdfximage
|  >width 9cm page 3 {TriangleCenters.pdf}. Why doesn't animate use this?
|  >
|  I know about this and I have been asked several times to incorporate
|  this feature. The main reason why I haven't done yet and probably won't
|  do in the future is the fact that PDF is the only format which supports
|  multiple pages and there are quite a few possible graphics formats
|  for use with animate, depending on the PDF producing route (pdfTeX or
|  dvips). Postscript may as well contain multiple pages but the `psfile'
|  special from dvips doesn't provide an option for selecting individual
|  pages.
|  
|  To make animate accept multipage PDFs would require to determine the type
|  of the file to be embedded and the number of pages therein. Next I would
|  have to redesign the inclusion macro \animategraphics to accept single
|  and multipage files in a consistent manner and to cope with erraneous
|  user input. All this seems to blow up the implementation and make it
|  prone to errors. Therefore I tend to stick to the pdftk solution.

Hi Alexander, 

Thanks for contributing the animate package; it's really useful!  

However, PDF is far from being the only multipage graphical format.
It would be great to be able to animate multi-page TIFF files, or MNG
files (http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/), or animated GIF89a files,
because it's rather messy to have to split up a file that may have
hundreds of frames.  I'm not saying it would be easy, but I don't
think it's just a niche application...

Jim