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User's Manual

Welcome! This manual is organized as a learning path: if you are new (especially if you are a math educator with little programming experience), just read Part I in order, since it takes you from zero to your first animation. After that, feel free to jump around; Parts II-IV are more of a catalog you consult as needed, and Part V is for the adventurous.

Part I: First steps (read these in order)

  1. Using the editor: Install the editor and create your first animation with snippets, almost without typing. Start here.
  2. A Groovy survival kit: The dozen language ideas (variables, dots, loops...) you need to follow the rest of the manual. No programming background required.
  3. The basic flow of an animation: What actually happens when you press F5: objects, the scene, play, and generating your final video.
  4. (Optional, for Java programmers) Using JMathAnim as a Java library: Skip this if you use the editor.

Part II: Objects and their looks

  1. Creating basic objects: Points, shapes, LaTeX text, axes, grids, images... The big catalog.
  2. Arrows, connectors and delimiters: Objects that point at, join or bracket other objects.
  3. Axes: Coordinate axes in depth: ticks, labels, arrow heads, and axes whose values are not their coordinates.
  4. Changing styles: Colors, gradients, thickness, dashes, and saving your favorite combinations.
  5. Transforming objects: Positioning, scaling, rotating, aligning and laying out objects.
  6. Adding labels: Putting names on vertices, sides, braces and moving points.

Part III: Making things move

  1. Animating objects: The heart of the library: creation, transforms, highlights, movement.
  2. Adding effects to animations: Combining animations, jumps, delays, and timing control.
  3. Dealing with cameras: Panning, zooming, and objects that stay put on screen.

Part IV: Mathematical formulas

  1. Mathematical formulas: Writing, slicing and animating LaTeX equations step by step.
  2. Coloring formulas: Coloring glyphs by rules ("all the x's in blue") with code or with the visual editor.
  3. Dynamic text. Linking: Text that updates itself, like live coordinates of a moving point.

Part V: Going further

  1. Calculus objects: Function graphs, points on graphs, contour plots, density plots and vector fields.
  2. Constructible objects: Geogebra-style constructions (and importing your actual Geogebra files!).
  3. Dealing with paths: Bézier points, boolean operations, merging paths.
  4. Building your own compound objects: Making an object out of pieces that behaves as one thing and reacts to a value: a box that opens, a balance that tilts.
  5. Advanced topics: Updaters, trails, loci, sounds, and speeding up test runs.
  6. Writing your own plugin: Packing your own Java classes into a JAR the editor loads, so your objects become part of the library. The one chapter that asks you to compile something.

Reference

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