Information panel

Each window includes an anim.information dock that can display live HTML text and an optional helper canvas. This panel is useful for showing values, metrics, and contextual messages during animation.

Basic usage

The dock exists by default in every anim.window instance, but it is hidden at startup.

import anim

W = anim.window('Animation with information panel')
W.information.display(True)

Press i during animation to toggle visibility.

Default temporal information

When the information panel is visible, temporal metadata is inserted by default at the top of the panel by anim.information.setTime():

• the current iteration index (step)

• the animation time in seconds (time)

You can control this display with two flags:

W.information.show_steps = True   # show/hide iteration index
W.information.show_time = True    # show/hide animation time

Warning

The displayed time value is the animation time computed from step / fps. It matches physical time only when the animation effectively runs at its target fps.

In practice, this value is reliable in exported movies when animation fps and movie fps are consistent. During interactive playback, if update steps are heavy and the window cannot keep up with the target fps, displayed animation time can diverge from wall-clock time.

Updating displayed content

The text area renders HTML. Update it by assigning to W.information.html (typically inside your canvas update method):

def update(self, t):
         self.window.information.html = f'<p>Step: {t.step}</p>'
         super().update(t)

In the informations demo, the panel is updated in real time with the animated image width and height.

Layout and sizing

The dock width is controlled by W.information.width. This value is a fraction of the window height (default: 0.25).

W.information.width = 0.30

You can also provide your own information panel class when creating the window by passing the information constructor argument of anim.window.