animation support in html and markdown

[gabysbrain]

Hi! I needed to add support for creating animations with the markdown renderer for my own stuff and figured it would be good to have directly in knitr. Right now it only works with png output and uses ffmpeg to create the movie.

What do you think?

[yihui]

Oops... you have already started working on what I planned to do two months later in Google Summer of Code: http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2012:knitr

FFmpeg is certain one way to go, and I'm thinking how to include more support to animations in HTML (like saveHTML() and saveGIF() in my animation package). I will come back and see what I can do. Thanks a lot!

[yihui]

I think this is sub(str_c(fig.num, '$'), '%d', x[1]), right?

I do not see a particular reason to restrict to png only, e.g. how about fig.fname = str_c(sub(str_c(fig.num, '$'), '%d', x[1]), x[2])

[yihui]

I will be happy to accept this pull request after you have made the changes I mentioned above (you just keep pushing to your fork and they will appear here). For consistency of style, I will replace <- with = later after merging your code, and in future I guess I will also generalize this hook beyond ffmpeg.

Thanks!

[gabysbrain]

Great! I'll probably make those changes soon. It depends on how much I want to procrastinate on this paper deadline :)

I looked at your summer of code proposal. It actually looks like your interests and mine are aligned. I'd also like to have a notebook-style interface running R for computations. There's a project I've recently set up on bitbucket right now: https://bitbucket.org/gabysbrain/r-notebook if you're interested. In my case I'm using markdown for the text format.

For the animations my main motivation for using mp4 for the animations is for quick and dirty interactive plots. I generate a series of plots, each one with a different setting for a variable and then use the slider to interactively move through the different variable settings. I think it would be great if the other animation types are supported.

[yihui]

I do not have access to that repository but I believe markdown will change R users' impression about dynamic reporting. Sweave has a high barrier, i.e. LaTeX. I will focus more on markdown in version 0.5 to make it even easier to write code and compile.

The above changes are actually pretty easy; I'm sure you can do them in 5 minutes :)

[gabysbrain]

Ah yes, I accidentally left the project as private. It's accessible now, but there's not much there.

Anyway, the changes are all done.

[yihui]

thanks, I have added it to my watch list