[pdftex] animated gifs in pdflatex documents?

[Peter Schröder]

I am typesetting a paper in pdflatex. This will be viewable online (say 
in Acrobat) but of course should also print in a predictable manner. 
What I would like to do is include a brief animation. I could do that in 
the form of an animated gif. Can I put such a beast (say with graphicx) 
into the pdf and have it animate in Acrobat? What happens when I print 
the document? Ideally I'd like to control which of the gif images is the 
"representative" that should appear in the printed version. I realize 
that I could to an animation with an external viewer and just have a 
hyperlink in the pdf, but I need to produce a self contained pdf for 
which external link dependencies are not acceptable (blind reviewing 
process...).

On a related note. What I would REALLY like to do is put into the 
document a small java applet. I don't believe that is possible. Or has 
that changed? Basically I want to be able to publish in a self contained 
manner a document which contains 3D data and an associated java viewer 
to interactively (in something like acrobat) examine the data all the 
while having the page of the paper up (and then have some decent print 
behavior where the viewer area would print as one particular example 
image). Am I out of luck?

peter