R: Convert images to Flash animations

saveSWF {animation}

R Documentation

Convert images to Flash animations

Description

This function opens a graphical device first to generate a sequence of images based on expr, then makes use of the commands in ‘SWF Tools’ (png2swf, jpeg2swf, pdf2swf) to convert these images to a single Flash animation.

Usage

saveSWF(expr, swf.name = "animation.swf", img.name = "Rplot", swftools = NULL, ...)

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)`).
`img.name`	file name of the sequence of images (‘pure’ name; without any format or extension)
`swf.name`	file name of the Flash file
`swftools`	the path of ‘SWF Tools’, e.g. ‘C:/swftools’. This argument is to make sure that `png2swf`, `jpeg2swf` and `pdf2swf` can be executed correctly. If it is `NULL`, it should be guaranteed that these commands can be executed without the path; anyway, this function will try to find SWF Tools from Windows registry even if it is not in the PATH variable.
`...`	other arguments passed to `ani.options`, e.g. `ani.height` and `ani.width`, ...

Value

An integer indicating failure (-1) or success (0) of the converting (refer to system).

Note

Please download and install the SWF Tools before using this function: http://www.swftools.org

We can also set the path to SWF Tools by ani.options(swftools = 'path/to/swftools').

ani.options('ani.type') can only be one of png, pdf and jpeg.

Also note that PDF graphics can be compressed using qpdf or Pdftk (if either one is installed and ani.options('qpdf') or ani.options('pdftk') has been set); see qpdf or pdftk.

Author(s)

Yihui Xie <http://yihui.name>

References

http://animation.yihui.name/animation:start#create_flash_animations

Examples

## from png to swf
saveSWF({
    par(mar = c(3, 3, 1, 1.5), mgp = c(1.5, 0.5, 0))
    knn.ani(test = matrix(rnorm(16), ncol = 2), cl.pch = c(16, 2))
}, swf.name = "kNN.swf", interval = 1.5, nmax = ifelse(interactive(), 40, 2))

## from pdf (vector plot) to swf; can set the option 'pdftk' to compress PDF
saveSWF({
    brownian.motion(pch = 21, cex = 5, col = "red", bg = "yellow")
}, swf.name = "brownian.swf", interval = 0.2, nmax = 30, ani.dev = "pdf", ani.type = "pdf", 
    ani.height = 6, ani.width = 6)

[Package animation version 2.2 Index]