saveSWF: Convert images to Flash animations

In animation: A Gallery of Animations in Statistics and Utilities to Create Animations

Convert images to Flash animations

Description

This function opens a graphical device first to generate a sequence of images based on expr, then makes use of the commands in SWFTools (png2swf, jpeg2swf, pdf2swf) to convert these images to a single Flash animation.

Usage

saveSWF(
  expr,
  swf.name = "animation.swf",
  img.name = "Rplot",
  swftools = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

expr	an expression to generate animations; use either the animation functions (e.g. brownian.motion()) in this package or a custom expression (e.g. for(i in 1:10) plot(runif(10), ylim = 0:1)).
swf.name	file name of the Flash file
img.name	the base file name of the sequence of images (without any format or extension)
swftools	the path of SWFTools, e.g. ‘C:/swftools’. This argument is to make sure that png2swf, jpeg2swf and pdf2swf can be executed correctly. If it is NULL, it should be guaranteed that these commands can be executed without the path; anyway, this function will try to find SWFTools from Windows registry even if it is not in the PATH variable.
...	other arguments passed to ani.options, e.g. ani.height and ani.width, ...

Value

An integer indicating failure (-1) or success (0) of the converting (refer to system).

Note

Please download and install the SWFTools before using this function: https://github.com/swftools/swftools

We can also set the path to SWF Tools by ani.options(swftools = 'path/to/swftools').

ani.options('ani.type') can only be one of png, pdf and jpeg.

Also note that PDF graphics can be compressed using qpdf or Pdftk (if either one is installed and ani.options('qpdf') or ani.options('pdftk') has been set); see qpdf or pdftk.

Author(s)

Yihui Xie

References

Examples at https://yihui.org/animation/example/saveswf/

See Also

Other utilities: im.convert(), saveGIF(), saveHTML(), saveLatex(), saveVideo()

animation documentation built on Aug. 27, 2025, 1:09 a.m.