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Templates for Project Reports and Dissertations
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There are two common packages for report writing. Neither is ideal.
Microsoft Word
The world's most popular word-processing software, Word is available for PC and Mac, and under Wine on Linux systems.
Word's great advantage, apart from ubiquity, is that what you see is what you get. Sadly, despite 30 years of
development, Word continues to be difficult to use for scientific purposes, not least because its latest incarnations
make automatic equation numbering difficult and unreliable. What you see may drive you towards insanity...
For simple reports with uncomplicated equations, Word can nonetheless be used to produce an attractively laid-out report
quite quickly, and a number of writers have produced templates for reports and scientific papers. Links to a few are
given below. Beware that not all provide automatic numbering, and some will include some extra pages (dedication,
lists of figures etc.)that will need to be deleted.
TeX and LaTeX
Most physicists use Donald Knuth's excellent and free typesetting system TeX, usually via its friendly LaTeX wrapper
and often using an editor/shell system such as
WinEDT (university licence), TeXnicCenter,
TeXworks or a number of others for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You may find
that you already have a TeX system installed on your computer. TeX documents are written as marked-up plain text, which
means that a few commands and a little basic syntax must be learnt before starting, but once you are familiar with the
system most things become straightforward. Although not WYSIWYG, modern editors are quick to compile a screen preview of
the document. TeX's strengths are that it is excellent at handling equations, automatic numbering of sections, figures
and so on, references and production of an index. Formatting in TeX is controlled by separate style files, the
editing of which is not for the faint-hearted but, if one of the many existing templates is satisfactory, there's
rarely need to meddle.
Most TeX distributions include a number of styles suitable for lab reports, including the standard
article
styles. Some alternative templates are
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