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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Using Beamer Animations to simulate Terminal Input and Output

I've been meaning to write about this for some time.  A few months ago, I had to prepare some training material on Unix basics and such.  While beamer was a natural choice for the presentation, I wanted to show some nifty animations that showed the commands and outputs as typed in a terminal.  I had the written text all done up but didn't know how to get the animation correct; I had misunderstood the features of animate package on CTAN.

Being stuck, I posted on tex stackexchange and had a beautiful solution from Alexander Grahn who went out of his way to solve my different issues that I had with my code.  Finally, on a beamer slide, you can now autoplay simulated Unix commands and expected output while giving a talk, instead of doing uncover on mouse click in beamer.

If you want to see my code instead of the one posted on the stackexchange site, do email me and I shall mail it separately.

EDIT: the compiled PDF can be found here, as requested. Of course you have to download it and open it in Reader for you to see the animations; it won't work in the web preview.

3 comments:

Vinh Nguyen said...

Can you post the end results of the pdf? I'd like to see it before trying. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

The same with me please post the pdf for getting a better impression.

sivaram said...

right, updated page with an example PDF.