Is there a reason why animated .gifs don't work in FM or publish to pdf? & will they next version?

Report · Nov 28, 2016

Is there a reason why animated .gifs don't work in FM or publish to pdf? & will they in the next version of Tech Comm suite?

I'd like to use short explainer .gifs in FM (don't think silly video Facebook stuff, think sensible short explainer video, but lighter weight) and at the moment I'd need to export to .pdf and have the animation work, with control over auto-start or not (mostly not). It doesn't seem to be possible now as the 'gifs don't animate in FM or when converted to .pdf. But it seems such an obvious thing to want to do? Am I missing something?

I really don't want to have to do manual changes in Acrobat for a 500 page document.

Oh and Is it likely there'll be a new version of TechComm suite any time soon?

Report · Nov 28, 2016

Hi Sarah,

the Adobe PDF format currently does not support animated GIFs.

But it does support videos. So maybe the following approach works for you: Convert the animated GIFs to mp4 (just google for "animated gif to mp4" and you will find tons of free tools to do this) and then reference the mp4 in FrameMaker. Then publish to PDF. The videos will play in PDF. In addition, you might want to set the animated GIF as a "Poster Image" in FM for the video, so that the reader will see the image already and not only the generic "Play" button.

Hope that helps,

*Stefan.

P.S.: For updates and announcements for a new TechComm Suite, you might want to follow our social media channels on our Facebook page, our Twitter Account, our LinkedIn Group and the Adobe TechComm Blog 😉

Report · Nov 28, 2016

Hi Stefan

Many thanks for your reply.

Yes I've tried with videos, I'll have to stick to video.

I guess I thought .gifs might be a smaller size and was just a bit surprised when it didn't work. I think as long as .gifs could be set to not auto-start, then the looping approach for little snippets that seem too short for video, would be a pretty useful feature. Repetition can sometimes be helpful, so I can see times where the action of "choosing to stop a looping gif when you've got the point" might work better than expecting people to choose to "re-play a video". (Tho I guess I could set a video to loop, I hadn't really considered that).

I do get a bit frustrated with videos by the black border (a line all the way around, not side bars) that pdfs put round videos when published from FM, and the lack of control over the positioning and colour of the playback controls (unless manually changed in Acrobat). I'll have to hope for more options and controls in the next version

Report · Aug 24, 2020

Hi Stefan,

I am now facing a faulty animated gif import issue in FM (2019). Found this thread. My wish - display of a 5 sec animated gif that I made showing cursor movements for a task, auto-animated upon Publish to html5 output, not needing a user to hit Play (as they would for mp4); is this possiple? I saw an option to insert an adobe captivate 'demo', would that solve the issue?, would it show a looping animated gif automatically or is it an mp4 situation where the user initiates the video? Thanks for any help you may provide.

Cheers,

William