Merry Christmas Using R Yihui Xie / 2009-12-24 Life should be fun. I saw a post in R-help list saying Merry Christmas to other useRs, and I followed up by some R code which can produce a naive animation like this: Here is the code to generate the above Flash animation with shining Christmas: library(animation) saveSWF({ n = length(speed <- runif(angle <- runif(x <- strsplit("MERRY CHRISTMAS", "")[[1]], 0, 360), 0, 15)) for (j in 1:300) { angle = angle + speed plot.new() plot.window(c(1, n), c(0, 1)) for (i in 1:n) text(i, 0.5, x[i], srt = angle[i], cex = runif(1, 1, 4), col = sample(colors(), 1)) text(n, 0, "Yihui @ 2009-12-24 (http://yihui.org)", adj = c(1, 0), col = "white", cex = 0.8) } }, interval = 0.04, dev = "pdf", outdir = getwd(), para = list(mar = rep(0, 4), bg = "black"), width = 8, height = 1) ## in animation package (>=1.1-0), see demo('Xmas') There are other animation formats in the R package animation: use saveMovie() to get a GIF animation (need ImageMagick) ani.start() and ani.stop() can produce an HTML page with the animation in it saveLatex() can embed an animation into a PDF document