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I downloaded the tex file for the documentation of animate package by Alexander Grahn and tried to run it on MikTeX instead of giving me the PDF output it generate the following error:

! LaTeX Error: Please use LaTeX to compile this documentation.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.46   \makeatother

Kindly let me know how can I fix this.

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What command did MikTeX run? Did it do pdflatex or latex or...? – Seamus May 29 '11 at 15:29
It did pdflatex – Scientist May 29 '11 at 15:53

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You need to compile it using latex and not pdflatex. You'll get a .dvi file that now you can convert to .ps using dvips <file>.dvi; then you can use ps2pdf <file>.ps to obtain a .pdf file. Your editor probably has an output profile (LaTeX=>PS=>PDF in the case of TeXnicCenter) that can help you to automate this process.

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Any idea why it needs DVI output? The package seems to support pdflatex: "Package ‘animate’ supports the usual PDF making workflows, i. e. pdfLATEX, LATEX ! dvips ! ps2pdf/Distiller and (X E)LATEX ! (x)dvipdfmx.". – Martin Scharrer♦ May 29 '11 at 16:00
BTW: Also I personally would have phrased the error message differently, because I count pdflatex to LaTeX, which is more a collective term. (Not that I blame that on you, Gonzalo) – Martin Scharrer♦ May 29 '11 at 16:02
3  
@Martin: the package supports pdflatex, but the file animate.tex (which I assume was the file that Scientist tried to compile) uses PS-Tricks (\usepackage{pst-3dplot}), so it requires latex for its compilation. – Gonzalo Medina May 29 '11 at 16:11
Indeed, some of the examples in the documentation rely on PSTricks. Furthermore, for converting the intermediate PS file into PDF, ps2pdf is required plus option -dNOSAFER. While producing the last of the examples, a Lorentz attractor, Ghostscript solves the Lorentz equations and writes the data into a text file subsequently read by the plotting commands of PSTricks. I couldn't persuade Distiller to write intermediate files (no option -dNOSAFER or similar), that is why Ghostscript. – AlexG May 30 '11 at 7:36
@Martin: I will improve the message text in the source file – AlexG May 30 '11 at 7:42
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