Motivation

• Sometimes, animation is a great boost for a scientific idea in a paper.
• Though PDF is a old fashion communication media, we could add animation to it to give it some vigor.

Method

For small gif type short movie, using animate is a good choice. The syntax for using it is simple

\usepackage{animate}
...
\animategraphics{24}{anim-}{0}{99}

You need to have an image sequence, e.g. named anim-%d.png then you can let latex process it into an animation.

If you already got a bunched gif file at hand, you need to export it into an image sequence. Then ImageMagick is your friend! It’s a command line tool supporting many image manipulations. Here you need

magick convert alpha=0.100000_beta=0.900000.gif -coalesce anim.png

Then you will have your image sequence there.

Note: Directly using convert is good on Unix system. For windows, there is a system program ` convert.exe shipped with Windows. So you have to use magick convert`

Then you get your animation in the paper!

Reference

For bugs and compilation problems see the following resources:

https://liam.page/2017/08/10/importing-animate-in-LaTeX/

https://texblog.org/2018/03/05/the-animate-package/

https://help.geogebra.org/topic/how-to-include-animated-gif-in-latex-pdf

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7602/how-to-add-a-gif-file-to-my-latex-file