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I run a technical blog and publish articles regularly that have GIF animations. Examples: one two three.

I plan to aggregate a bunch of these articles into an eBook of sorts. I know I could break out the animations into individual, still images, but I think the fact that they are animated make them much more conducive to learning and involving for the reader.

As far as I know, a typical PDF does not allow for a GIF animation. If not for a PDF, what options do I have for a published eBook that also allow for these animations?

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  • Do they have to stay as animated GIFs? Or could you convert them to a different format that is more easily included in a popular eBook format? – Brandon Haugen Jan 26 '17 at 22:43
  • @BrandonHaugen What other format would allow an animation / video in a PDF? – Eddie Jan 27 '17 at 1:12
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    PDF supports a variety of video formats, depending on what the intended audience is going to view the files with these may be an option. Adobe provides a list of what is supported by Acrobat : helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/… – Brandon Haugen Jan 27 '17 at 1:17
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    EPUB 3.0 supports a variety of video formats as well that might suit your needs. I am not sure if EPUB reading applications are better or worse at supporting video than PDF viewing applications : epubzone.org/news/multimedia-support-in-epub-3 – Brandon Haugen Jan 27 '17 at 1:19
  • @BrandonHaugen Interesting, didn't know about video support in PDFs. Thanks for the link. Regarding EPUB, how portable is that? I would hate to have to troubleshoot case by case when customers purchase EPUB, versus the general ubiquitous support for PDF files. – Eddie Jan 27 '17 at 20:06
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We can integrate the gif format in epub3 packages say as a background to div container or another option would be convert gif to mp4 format.

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  • Sorry to just now see this answer. Could you elaborate, Leon? Yes, the GIFs can be converted to MP4 (they started as MP4, actually). – Eddie Sep 10 '18 at 1:46

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