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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that I miss in linux is a pdf viewer that can show inline animations (like those produced by LaTeX's "animate" package). I am still forced to run adobe's 32 bit pdf viewer because it is the only viewer available in linux that supports this kind of pdf.

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Wow, that seems like a rather questionable feature for a "portable document format".

If you use pdf for making slides for a presentation, it is a legitimate use case to want some automatic animations or videos. It is actually possible, and adobe's viewer certainly supports it, but no program on linux does.

You could argue that we shouln't be using pdf for making slides in the first place, and maybe you are true. But if I want beautiful math typography (which is even more important than animations), all other options are sadly not up to par.

I understand; I used Beamer back in college. It just seems like that's not really a good fit for the original purpose of PDF files. If they wanted to support presentations, maybe they should have created a new file type based on PDF but with extra capabilities.

I just tried it in Okular (KDE's own) and it works. You have to let Okular "Show Forms" first, but it very conveniently shows the button at the top of the window.

Oh, man, you just saved my life! Now I can do everything I need with free software (notwithstanding that Okular's interface is quite wonky, but whatever).

I never know about pdf inline animation. Do you have some sample of pdf files that contain inline animation? I would like to try them on various pdf viewer.

The documentation of the "animate" package contains an example on the first page:

http://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/animate/animate.pdf

Notice that, while this is just a silly example, animations are very useful in serious technical presentations. For example, in research about image or video processing, you often want to alternate automatically (without user interaction) between the "before" and "after" images, or along a few frames of a video sequence.

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