How to "Animate" a Bitmap Image

[StraderCP]

One of the strengths of Impress (or Microsoft's near-equivalent, Power Point) is its ability to display information one piece at a time. As in days of yore when the high school teacher would use a sheet of paper to cover that part of the overhead transparency s/he was not ready to present, having your audience focus on just what you're talking about at the moment – not being able to 'read ahead' on the information which has yet to be displayed – the “one piece at a time” approach enables your audience (and its speaker) to remain better focused.

When your presentation involves a bitmap image, it is not directly possible to display the content of that image “one piece at a time.” For example, the image upoaded at http://www.redynstruc.info/OpenOffice/BeyondPowerPointAnimateBitmapFigure1.jpg is something I took from one of the US EPA's pages on global warming. While this chart does a pretty good job of showing the correlation between CO2 and temperature, it would be much more effective if the graphical data were displayed in “pieces” so that, for example, the period from 400 BCE to 300 BCE was displayed first, the period from 300 BCE to 200 BCE displayed next, and so forth.

An article I wrote on how to do this is published in OpenOffice format at http://www.redynstruc.info/OpenOffice/BeyondPowerPointAnimateBitmapHowTo.odt and, in pdf format, at http://www.redynstruc.info/OpenOffice/BeyondPowerPointAnimateBitmapHowTo.pdf . An Impress document containing the example I reference in the article is published at
http://www.redynstruc.info/OpenOffice/BeyondPowerPointAnimateBitmapExample.odp .

You can email me at curtsnyder@charter.net if these links don't work or you have any questions.

Regards,
Strader Redynstruc

[acknak]

Hey, very nice idea! Thanks for writing it up and providing an example.

There should be a central repository for things like this. I'm pretty sure the OO.org documentation project can archive and serve things like this, but I don't know what the current status is.

If you're interested in having them "adopt" your document, just ask and we can track down some more information.