[pdftex] [CTAN] Update: animate

[James Quirk]

Victor,

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Victor Ivrii wrote:

> 
> AR 8.1.0 on MacIntel 8.4.10: plays very smoothly, drags well but I
> managed no more than twice to drag while animation was running.
It's quite possible that there's a bug or two that need ironing out.
When I get the chance I will take a look at it.

> 
> It would be great to get a TeX distillation of the code. Also I wonder
> if it could be dragged to another page (test1  has just one page) or
> how two such animals would share the same page: can one be dragged on
> the top of another?
The implementation has quite a clean OO design and so there is
no problem with having multiple draggable objects on the same
page. The current implementation will not allow you to drag
across page boundaries, but the draggable-entity can live on 
multiple pages. Basically, one can assign a /Widget annotation
to live on more than one page, but AR is not able to reassign
the page at run time. Maybe Acrobat would allow the page
to be reassigned?

Regarding a TeX distillation, with the emergence of LuaTeX
I have been able to distill out the essence of Amrita's programming
model and implement it directly in Lua. This will allow 
me to recycle swathes of AMRITA's standard-librares, such
as the drag-and-drop machinery. And unlike AMRITA with it's 
computational machinery, it should be portable across platforms
e.g. windows, osx, linux. I'm well past the proof-of-concept
stage, but the implementation is not yet ready for public consumption.

If you would like to be an OSX guinea pig, send me a note off-line.

James
  

> 
> Victor
> 
>