saveLatex()

Record animation frames and insert them into a LaTeX document with the animate package. Compile the document if an appropriate LaTeX command is provided.

This is actually a wrapper to generate a LaTeX document using R. The document uses the LaTeX package called animate to insert animations into PDF’s. When we pass an R expression to this function, the expression will be evaluated and recorded by a grahpics device (typically png and pdf). At last, a LaTeX document will be created and compiled if an appropriate LaTeX command is provided. And the final PDF output will be opened with the PDF viewer set in getOption('pdfviewer') if ani.options('autobrowse') == TRUE.

library(animation)
## brownian motion: note the 'loop' option in ani.opts and the careful settings
## in documentclass

saveLatex({
  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)
  brownian.motion(pch = 21, cex = 5, col = "red", bg = "yellow", main = "Demonstration of Brownian Motion")
}, img.name = "BM", ani.opts = "controls,loop,width=0.95\\textwidth", latex.filename = "brownian_motion.tex",
  interval = 0.1, nmax = 10, ani.dev = "pdf", ani.type = "pdf", ani.width = 7,
  ani.height = 7, documentclass = paste("\\documentclass{article}", "\\usepackage[papersize={7in,7in},margin=0.3in]{geometry}",
    sep = "\n"))

## the PDF graphics output is often too large because it is uncompressed; try
## the option ani.options('pdftk') or ani.options('qpdf') to compress the PDF
## graphics; see ?pdftk or ?qpdf and ?ani.options