saveLatex: Insert animations into a LaTeX document and compile it

Description

Record animation frames and insert them into a LaTeX document with the animate package. Compile the document if an appropriate LaTeX command is provided.

Usage

saveLatex(
  expr,
  nmax,
  img.name = "Rplot",
  ani.opts,
  centering = TRUE,
  caption = NULL,
  label = NULL,
  pkg.opts = NULL,
  documentclass = "article",
  latex.filename = "animation.tex",
  pdflatex = "pdflatex",
  install.animate = TRUE,
  overwrite = TRUE,
  full.path = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

expr

an expression to generate animations; use either the animation functions (e.g. brownian.motion()) in this package or a custom expression (e.g. for(i in 1:10) plot(runif(10), ylim = 0:1)).

nmax

maximum number of animation frames (if missing and the graphics device is a bitmap device, this number will be automatically calculated); note that we do not have to specify nmax when using PDF devices.

img.name

basename of file names of animation frames; see the Note section for a possible adjustment on img.name

ani.opts

options to control the behavior of the animation (passed to the LaTeX macro '\animategraphics'; default to be 'controls,width=\linewidth')

centering

logical: whether to center the graph using the LaTeX environment \begin{center} and \end{center}

caption, label

caption and label for the graphics in the figure environment

pkg.opts

global options for the animate package

documentclass

LaTeX document class; if NULL, the output will not be a complete LaTeX document (only the code to generate the PDF animation will be printed in the console); default to be article, but we can also provide a complete statement like \documentclass[a5paper]{article}

latex.filename

file name of the LaTeX document; if an empty string '', the LaTeX code will be printed in the console and hence not compiled

pdflatex

the command for pdfLaTeX (set to NULL to ignore the compiling)

install.animate

copy the LaTeX style files animate.sty and animfp.sty? If you have not installed the LaTeX package animate, it suffices just to copy these to files.

overwrite

whether to overwrite the existing image frames

full.path

whether to use the full path (TRUE) or relative path (FALSE) for the animation frames; usually the relative path suffices, but sometimes the images and the LaTeX document might not be in the same directory, so full.path = TRUE could be useful; in the latter case, remember that you should never use spaces in the filenames or paths!

...

other arguments passed to the graphics device ani.options('ani.dev'), e.g. ani.height and ani.width

Value

Invisible NULL

Details

This is actually a wrapper to generate a LaTeX document using R. The document uses the LaTeX package called animate to insert animations into PDF's. When we pass an R expression to this function, the expression will be evaluated and recorded by a grahpics device (typically png and pdf). At last, a LaTeX document will be created and compiled if an appropriate LaTeX command is provided. And the final PDF output will be opened with the PDF viewer set in getOption('pdfviewer') if ani.options('autobrowse') == TRUE.

References

Examples at https://yihui.org/animation/example/savelatex/

To know more about the animate package, please refer to http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/animate/. There are a lot of options can be set in ani.opts and pkg.opts.