Guidelines for report writing

You should write one report per project, four in total.

The format of the original report and what to include
In general, for each assignment, include a new section and the following subsections in your report.

1) Problem
 State the task you are going to solve, using you own words.

2) Theory and implementation
Describe how you solved the task. You should include your understanding of the problem and your "theoretical" strategy on how to solve it. Also, the programming strategy and implementation should be described.

3) Results and discussion
State the results, giving resulting numbers, plots etc. Also, comment on your results and interpret. Discuss if the results are as you expected. Why/why not? If there are explicit questions about the interpretation of the results, or it explicitly says that you should comment, in the lab instructions -  be extra careful to really include this.

Include your full code in the appendix, make sure that it is well structured and that you have made comments.

For each figure and table you include in the report: remember to refer to the figure/table in the text and also to write a caption that explains the content of the figure.

For some of the projects there will be separate instructions for writing the report, providing help on what we expect you to include in the report. Please read it carefully and follow the instructions!


Returns
Please, do not hand in the original report with some changes here and there but instead try to make it easy for us to see what you have changed. In the corrected report you should find a number of comments from the teacher about things to do/change/elaborate on that will give you the points that you have missed. We want to see these things added/changed, either clearly marked in the original document or in a separate document with notes on which corrections you are making. Remember to also hand in the corrected original report (if you got it back in paper copy) together with the return!

If you have done one part of the lab previously and now complete it with another part, please state clearly which sections you have added to the report.



Some help on starting to use Latex

The easiest way to get started with using Latex is to register for an account at www.sharelatex.com.
Use your @student.chalmers.se email address for registration in order to automatically get an premium account.

Using an editor and the terminal in Linux or Mac
One editor you can use is named gedit, see also section below for using emacs.
To produce .pdf files from your .tex file, open the terminal and go to the directory where you have saved the file (ls and cd are commands that help you with this). Type latex filename.tex, where "filename.tex" is the name of your report file. This gives you a .dvi file, type dvipdf filename.dvi in the terminal to convert the .dvi file to a .pdf file. 

Basically you use an editor of your choice to write your report file, save the document with file-ending .tex and then use a latex compiler.

Using an editor and the terminal in Linux or Mac

One editor you can use is named gedit, see also section below for using emacs.
To produce .pdf files from your .tex file, open the terminal and go to the directory where you have saved the file (ls and cd are commands that help you with this). Type latex filename.tex, where "filename.tex" is the name of your report file. This gives you a .dvi file, type dvipdf filename.dvi in the terminal to convert the .dvi file to a .pdf file. 

If you want to use the editor emacs in Linux
1) Open a terminal and go to the directory that you chose to work in.
2) Type emacs filename.tex & where "filename" is the name of your report file.
3) Write you latex code in the editor that the previous command opened.
4) Go to TeX → TeX File. This creates a filename.dvi file in your working directory.
5) To view the filename.dvi file go to TeX → Tex View.
6) Finally, to convert the filename.dvi to filename.pdf go to your terminal window and write dvipdf filename.dvi filename.pdf.

Using Windows
One program that you can use to compile .tex files in windows is MikTex. Just open TeXworks, write your code and press the green "play" icon to the top-left. It should give you a .pdf file as default.
Although you can write your code directly in TeXworks, perhaps you would like an interface where you do not have to type out everything yourself. WinEdt provides that. You can compile your .tex file by, for example, going to Tex -> TeXify. It will give you a .dvi file. To convert .dvi to .pdf go to TeX -> PDF -> dvi2pdf. You can also create a .pdf file directly through TeX -> PDF -> PDFTeXify. A note for you who work on your own laptop. WinEdt is an editor, it is not a latex compiler. In order for it to work you will have to install MikTex as well.

Useful links to get you started writing Latex code
For a short tutorial, just type "Latex tutorial" in google and pick one!
At this page you find "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e", which is a nice document to use as a tutorial and reference.
A short introduction to Latex in Swedish can be found here, hittas under rubriken "Handledningen".

A short introduction to Latex in English can be found here.

Examples of tex documents that you can use as starting points

Report: tex-file ,ps-file, pdf-file
Figure for Report: figure

A newer example: Here is the .tex file for an old draft of one of the projects together with the necessary figures and the corresponding .dvi and .pdf files. You can use it as a template for the latex code. It should cover everything that you will need for your own report except for the \begin{verbatim} \end{verbatim} commands that you can use to insert programming code in the .tex file.

tex-filedvi-filepdf-file, figure1, figure2, figure3, figure4, figure5