I teach acoustics and vibration, and I use a lot of Python animations in Jupyter notebooks with my students. It’s useful for them to be able to step back and forth through the animation a frame at a time within the notebook.
I’d like to develop these notebooks into an online book, and I’ve been looking into JupyterBook. But I’d also like to use Julia for the book (I’m restricted to Python for the day-to-day teaching, for now at least).
Is there a Julia animation tool that can provide stepping controls within the notebook/book? Would the choice of JupyterBook, Book.jl, Franklin.jl or another platform to build the book make a difference?
Quarto (https://quarto.org/) seems to get some positive reviews lately, it’s meant to be used with Python and Julia at the same time which could simplify things for you.
About the animations, would it be enough to render a video file and then embed that? You can drag forward and backward with normal video controls but it’s not a step-one-frame kind of UI. But it would be supported by basically any visualization tool.
Not Julia so not very satisfying in this context, but there is an open source animation program developed by University of Cincinnati students that is written in Matlab and last time I checked was hosted by Abravibe and also discussed on Matlab Central. It is used to animate operating deflection shapes and modal analysis results. It will create gif files that can be used for documentation.