[metapost] Animated graphics with Metapost?

[Wolfgang Schuster]

Am 11.06.2011 um 08:18 schrieb Dirk Laurie:

> I'd like to make an incremental version of a drawing, i.e.
> when displayed it starts of with just a line and gradually
> adds more lines, points, color fill-ins etc, which one can
> then display as an animation.
> 
> I've thought of this approach:
> 
> 1. Make a Metapost drawing of each stage, with the visible parts
>    in black and the not-yet visible parts white.  This is the
>    same drawing each time with only the colors varying so that
>    there is no problem about superimposing frames of different size.
> 2. Import the Postscript files into GIMP and get it to make them
>    into an animated GIF.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1. If you straight off know amuch better way, please tell me.
> 2. For stage 1, is there a way in which I can implement the
>    following algorithm in Metapost?
> 
>    a. Draw everything in white
>    b. for k=1 to n, draw k-th stage in black and export current
>        version of the drawing as postscript.

LaTeX and ConTeXt provide mechanism to generate animations in
PDF files but you need the Adobe Reader to view them.

For LaTeX the animate [1] package is necessary while ConTeXt
doesn’t need extra packages, there is a example in the MetaFun
manual [2] on page 296 ff.

[1] http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/animate/
[2] http://pragma-ade.com/show-man-7.htm

Wolfgang

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