% Generated by roxygen2: do not edit by hand
% Please edit documentation in R/ani.options.R
\name{ani.options}
\alias{ani.options}
\title{Set or query animation options}
\usage{
ani.options(...)
}
\arguments{
\item{...}{arguments in \code{tag = value} form, or a list of tagged values.
The tags usually come from the animation parameters described below, but
they are not restricted to these tags (any tag can be used; this is similar
to \code{\link{options}}).}
}
\value{
\code{ani.options()} returns a list containing the options: when
  parameters are set, their former values are returned in an invisible named
  list.  Such a list can be passed as an argument to
  \code{\link{ani.options}} to restore the parameter values.

  \code{ani.options('tag')} returns the value of the option \code{'tag'}.

  \code{ani.options(c('tag1', 'tag2'))} or \code{ani.options('tag1', 'tag2')}
  returns a list containing the corresponding options.
}
\description{
There are various parameters that control the behaviour of the animation,
such as time interval, maximum number of animation frames, height and width,
etc.
}
\note{
Please note that \code{nmax} is not always equal to the number of
  animation frames. Sometimes there is more than one frame recorded in a
  single step of a loop, for instance, there are 2 frames generated in each
  step of \code{\link{kmeans.ani}}, and 4 frames in \code{\link{knn.ani}},
  etc; whereas for \code{\link{newton.method}}, the number of animation
  frames is not definite, because there are other criteria to break the loop.

  This function can be used for almost all the animation functions such as
  \code{\link{brownian.motion}}, \code{\link{boot.iid}},
  \code{\link{buffon.needle}}, \code{\link{cv.ani}}, \code{\link{flip.coin}},
  \code{\link{kmeans.ani}}, \code{\link{knn.ani}}, etc. Most of the options
  here will affect the behaviour of animations of the formats HTML, GIF, SWF
  and PDF; on-screen animations are only affected by \code{interval} and
  \code{nmax}.
}
\section{Animation options}{
 The supported animation parameters: \describe{

  \item{interval}{ a positive number to set the time interval of the
  animation (unit in seconds); default to be 1. }

  \item{nmax}{ maximum number of steps in a loop (e.g. iterations) to create
  animation frames. Note: the actual number of frames can be less than this
  number, depending on specific animations. Default to be 50.}

  \item{ani.width, ani.height}{ width and height of image frames (unit in
  px); see graphics devices like \code{\link{png}}, \code{\link{jpeg}}, ...;
  default to be 480. NB: for different graphics devices, the units of these
  values might be different, e.g. PDF devices usually use inches, whereas
  bitmap devices often use pixels.}

  \item{imgdir}{character: the name of the directory (a relative path) for
  images when creating HTML animation pages; default to be \code{'images'}.}

  \item{htmlfile}{character: name of the target HTML main file (without path
  name; basename only; default to be \code{'index.html'})}

  \item{ani.dev}{a function or a function name: the graphics device; e.g.
  (\code{\link{png}}, \code{\link{pdf}}, ...); default to be \code{'png'}}

  \item{ani.type}{character: image format for animation frames, e.g.
  \code{png}, \code{jpeg}, ...; default to be \code{'png'}; this will be used
  as the file extension of images, so don't forget to change this option as
  well when you changed the option \code{ani.dev}}

  \item{title, description}{character: the title and description of the
  animation in the HTML page created by \code{\link{saveHTML}}}

  \item{verbose}{ logical or character: if \code{TRUE}, write a footer part
  in the HTML page containing detailed technical information; if given a
  character string, it will be used as the footer message; in other cases,
  the footer of the page will be blank.}

  \item{loop}{logical or numeric: Number of times the GIF animation is to
   cycle through the image sequence before stopping. By default, this is
   set to zero or boolean value TRUE (infinite loop).}

  \item{autobrowse}{logical: whether auto-browse the animation page
  immediately after it is created? (default to be \code{interactive()})}

  \item{autoplay}{logical: whether to autoplay the animation when the HTML
  page is loaded (default to be \code{TRUE}); only applicable to
  \code{\link{saveHTML}}}

  \item{use.dev}{ whether to use the graphics device specified in
  \code{ani.options('ani.dev')} (default to be \code{TRUE}); if \code{FALSE},
  we need to generate image files by our own approaches in the expression
  \code{expr} (see functions \code{\link{saveHTML}}, \code{\link{saveGIF}},
  \code{\link{saveLatex}} and \code{\link{saveSWF}}); this can be useful when
  the output cannot be captured by standard R graphics devices -- a typical
  example is the \pkg{rgl} graphics (we can use \code{rgl.snapshot} to
  capture \pkg{rgl} graphics to png files, or \code{rgl.postscript} to save
  plots as postscript/pdf; see \code{demo('rgl_animation')} or
  \code{demo('use_Cairo')} for examples or the last example below). Note,
  however, we do not really have to create the images using R graphics
  devices -- see \code{demo('flowers')} on how to download images from the
  Internet and create an HTML animation page!}

  }
}

\section{Hidden options}{
 There are a couple of ``hidden'' options which are
  designed to facilitate the usage of some functions but are not initialized
  like the above options when the package is loaded, including:

  \describe{

  \item{convert}{this option will be checked first when calling
  \code{\link{im.convert}} (or \code{\link{saveGIF}}) to see if it contains
  the path to \file{convert.exe}; we can specify it beforehand to save the
  efforts in searching for \file{convert.exe} in ImageMagick under Windows.
  For example, \code{ani.options(convert = 'c:/program
  files/imagemagick/convert.exe')}; note this option also works for Mac and
  Linux (see \code{help(im.convert)})}

  \item{swftools}{this can help \code{\link{saveSWF}} save the efforts of
  searching for the software package ``SWF Tools'' under Windows; e.g. we can
  specify \code{ani.options(swftools = 'c:/program files/swftools')} in
  advance}

  \item{img.fmt}{the value of this option can be used to determine the image
  filename format when we want to use custom graphics devices to record
  images, e.g. in \code{\link{saveLatex}}, if \code{ani.options('use.dev') ==
  FALSE}, then \code{ani.options('img.fmt')} will be a string like
  \code{'path/to/output/img.name\%d.png'}, so we can use it to generate file
  names in the argument \code{expr}; see \code{demo('rgl_animation')} for
  example or the last example below}

  \item{qpdf}{the path of the program \command{qpdf}, e.g.
  \code{ani.options(qpdf = 'C:/Software/qpdf/bin/qpdf.exe')}; \command{qpdf}
  is mainly used to compress PDF files in this package, and it is a smaller
  tool than \command{pdftk}. It is recommended over \command{pdftk}
  especially under Linux, because tests show that \command{pdftk} does not
  work well under Linux in compressing PDF files, while \command{qpdf} is
  much better.}

  \item{pdftk}{the path of the program \command{Pdftk}, e.g.
  \code{ani.options(pdftk = 'C:/Software/pdftk.exe')} or
  \code{ani.options(pdftk = '/home/john/bin/pdftk')}; \command{pdftk} will be
  used to compress the PDF graphics output in the function
  \code{\link{pdftk}}; compression will not be tried if this options is
  \code{NULL}. This option will only affect \code{\link{saveGIF}},
  \code{\link{saveLatex}} and \code{\link{saveSWF}} when
  \code{ani.options('ani.type')} is \code{'pdf'}.}

  \item{ffmpeg}{the path of the progam \command{ffmpeg}, e.g.
  \code{ani.options(ffmpeg = 'C:/Software/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg.exe')}; FFmpeg is
  used to convert a sequence of images to a video. See
  \code{\link{saveVideo}}.}

  }
}

\seealso{
\code{\link{options}}, \code{\link{dev.interactive}},
  \code{\link{saveHTML}}, \code{\link{saveGIF}}, \code{\link{saveLatex}},
  \code{\link{saveSWF}}, \code{\link{pdftk}}

  \url{http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/}

  \url{http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/}
}
\author{
Yihui Xie
}
