PDF Animations in RMarkdown

PDFanimation.Rmd

---
title: "Test Animation in PDF"
author: "Jonathan Carroll"
date: "09/10/2018"
output: pdf_document
header-includes:
  - \usepackage[final,autoplay]{animate}
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```

## Create individual frames

```{r}
library(ggplot2)

files <- path.expand(file.path("~", "Documents", "Sandbox", "PDFanimation", "indiv_plots"))
unlink(files, recursive = TRUE)
dir.create(files)

set.seed(1)
n <- 1e4
for (frame in 1:20) {
  d <- data.frame(x = rnorm(n, mean = frame, sd = frame/10)
  )
  g <- ggplot(d) + geom_density(aes(x)) + coord_cartesian(xlim = c(0, 20), ylim = c(0, 1))
  suppressMessages({
    ggsave(g, filename = file.path(files, paste0("frame_", frame, ".jpg")))
  })
}
```

## LaTeX Animation 

If you have lots of individual files, you can animate them with LaTeX. The code 
to produce this is from $LaTeX$. The YAML header requires

```{latex, eval = FALSE}
header-includes:
  - \usepackage[final,autoplay]{animate}
```

and the actual animation is created with

```{latex, eval = FALSE}
\animategraphics[width=0.8\textwidth,loop]{10}{`r paste0(files, "/frame_")`}{1}{20}
```

$\animategraphics[width=0.8\textwidth,loop]{10}{`r paste0(files, "/frame_")`}{1}{20}$

which will be viewable from Adobe Acrobat (at least).