saveHTML: Insert animations into an HTML page

Description

This function first records all the plots in the R expression as bitmap images, then inserts them into an HTML page and finally creates the animation using the SciAnimator library.

Usage

saveHTML(expr, img.name = "Rplot", global.opts = "", single.opts = "", ...)

Arguments

expr

an R expression to be evaluated to create a sequence of images

img.name

the filename of the images (the real output will be like img.name1.png, img.name2.png, ...); this name has to be different for different animations, since it will be used as the identifiers for each animation; make it as

global.opts

a string: the global options of the animation; e.g. we can specify the default theme to be blue using $.fn.scianimator.defaults.theme = 'blue'; note these options must be legal JavaScript expressions (ended by ';')

single.opts

the options for each single animation (if there are multiple ones in one HTML page), e.g. to use the dark theme and text labels for buttons:

'utf8': false, 'theme': 'dark'

or to remove the navigator panel (the navigator can affect

...

other arguments to be passed to ani.options to animation options such as the time interval between image frames

Value

the path of the output

Details

This is a much better version than ani.start and ani.stop, and all users are encouraged to try this function when creating HTML animation pages. It mainly uses the SciAnimator library, which is based on jQuery. It has a neat interface (both technically and visually) and is much easier to use or extend. Moreover, this function allows multiple animations in a single HTML page -- just use the same filename for the HTML page (specified in ani.options('htmlfile')).

Optionally the source code and some session information can be added below the animations for the sake of reproducibility (specified by the option ani.options('verbose') -- if TRUE, the description, loaded packages, the code to produce the animation, as well as a part of sessionInfo() will be written in the bottom of the animation; the R code will be highlighted using the SyntaxHighlighter library for better reading experience).

References

https://github.com/brentertz/scianimator

Examples

Run this code

## A quick and dirty demo
saveHTML({
    par(mar = c(4, 4, 0.5, 0.5))
    for (i in 1:20) {
        plot(runif(20), ylim = c(0, 1))
        ani.pause()
    }
}, img.name = "unif_plot", imgdir = "unif_dir", htmlfile = "random.html", autobrowse = FALSE, 
    title = "Demo of 20 uniform random numbers", description = c("This is a silly example.\n\n", 
        "You can describe it in more detail.", "For example, bla bla..."))



## we can merge another animation into the former page as long as 'htmlfile' is
## the same; this time I don't want the animation to autoplay, and will use
## text labels for the buttons (instead of UTF-8 symbols)
saveHTML({
    par(mar = c(4, 4, 0.5, 0.5))
    ani.options(interval = 0.5)
    for (i in 1:10) {
        plot(rnorm(50), ylim = c(-3, 3))
        ani.pause()
    }
}, img.name = "norm_plot", single.opts = "utf8: false", autoplay = FALSE, interval = 0.5, 
    imgdir = "norm_dir", htmlfile = "random.html", ani.height = 400, ani.width = 600, 
    title = "Demo of 50 Normal random numbers", description = c("When you write a long long long long description,", 
        "R will try to wrap the words automatically.", "Oh, really?!"))



## use the function brownian.motion() in this package; note this page is
## created in 'index.html' under ani.options('outdir')
saveHTML({
    par(mar = c(3, 3, 1, 0.5), mgp = c(2, 0.5, 0), tcl = -0.3, cex.axis = 0.8, cex.lab = 0.8, 
        cex.main = 1)
    ani.options(interval = 0.05, nmax = ifelse(interactive(), 150, 2))
    brownian.motion(pch = 21, cex = 5, col = "red", bg = "yellow")
}, img.name = "brownian_motion_a", htmlfile = "index.html", description = c("Random walk of 10 points on the 2D plane:", 
    "for each point (x, y),", "x = x + rnorm(1) and y = y + rnorm(1)."))



## we may feel that the navigation panel is too wide, so let's remove it in
## this example; the default value of 'controls' is: ['first', 'previous',
## 'play', 'next', 'last', 'navigator', 'loop', 'speed'], among which we need
## to remove 'navigator'
saveHTML({
    par(mar = c(3, 3, 1, 0.5), mgp = c(2, 0.5, 0), tcl = -0.3, cex.axis = 0.8, cex.lab = 0.8, 
        cex.main = 1)
    ani.options(interval = 0.05, nmax = ifelse(interactive(), 150, 2))
    brownian.motion(pch = 21, cex = 5, col = "red", bg = "yellow")
}, img.name = "brownian_motion_b", htmlfile = "index.html", single.opts = "'controls': ['first', 'previous', 'play', 'next', 'last', 'loop', 'speed'], 'delayMin': 0", 
    description = c("Random walk of 10 points on the 2D plane", "(without the navigation panel)"))


## use Rweb to create animations
if (interactive()) browseURL(system.file("misc", "Rweb", "demo.html", package = "animation"))

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