Nanotechnology Engineering Workterm Report in LaTeX

This is a LaTeX document class that was written with the intention of making the formatting of NE workterm reports easier.

The class was written by Michal Kononenko, with help from Paulo Miguel.

The package was written to conform to the work report guidelines v_1.1 in the Nanotechnology Engineering WKRPT 300 course. While we try our best to conform to the standard, we can IN NO WAY GUARANTEE THAT THIS PACKAGE WILL FORMAT THE WORK TERM REPORT PROPERLY. There may be bugs. Therefore, we must be vigilant. If you find a bug, please report it here.

Why Use LaTeX?

If you have never used LaTeX before, then you should give it a try. LaTeX is a fairly easy to use document preperation system that allows for high quality typesetting. LaTeX is especially useful when writing math equations in line and when dealing with tables and figures.

The best part of this class is that almost everything is done for you. Take a look at the example workterm report (example.tex) that is included in our package and you'll see how easy LaTeX can be.

You can also find more information on how to use LaTeX online:

• FAQ
• Getting Started with LaTeX

Using UWWorkTermReport

Using the package is extremely easy. The example.tex file has all the commands required to create the sections in the front matter, body, and back matter, Most importantly, it takes care of all the formatting as described in the WKRPT x00 documentation. It also explains the commands required to write math equations, insert figures and automatically generate your back matter.

Most importantly, this class automatically deals with page numbering, the table of contents, the list of figures and the list of figures, allowing you to only need to think about what to write and not how to format the document itself.

Useful Documentation

The following is a list of documentation pertaining to a few commands and packages that are useful when writing a workterm report. The majority of these packages and commands are used in the example.tex file. This list is meant to be used as further instructions if the example.tex is unclear.

• Tables
• Math using AMSMath package
• Figures
• Glossary and Acronyms

For more general documentation on LaTeX environments and commands, sharelatex.com is an extremely useful resource.

Compiling example.tex

Popular document editors like Microsoft Word are built on the principle of "WYSIWYG", or "What You See Is What You Get". LaTeX is not one of those editors. As a result, LaTeX requires a separate "compilation" step between you writing your .tex file, and converting that file into a .pdf file suitable for publishing or submission. Furthermore, some of the dynamic features like glossaries and references require are not part of a "standard" LaTeX compilation process. The onus is on you, the user, to run the makeglossaries and bibtex commands in the appropriate order to build your work term report. In order to successfully build the example document, you will need a TeX back end to do the actual typesetting. This project was tested with TeXLive as the back end. In order to meet the Times New Roman font requirements, xelatex was used as the typesetting engine.

Ensure that you have xelatex, bibtex, and makeglossaries available on your machine. You can check if you have them by using the which command, followed by the name of the program. On Windows, the command is where. If this works, follow the instructions below.

1. cd into the src directory of this repository.
2. Run xelatex example.tex. When you will be making your work term report, you will replace example.tex with your own .tex file. You should see a bunch of files in the source directory.
3. Run bibtex example. Notice the omission of the file extension. This is intentional. This will build a database of citations using a .bib file that you specify in your .tex file.
4. Run makeglossaries example, again omitting the file extension. This program works similarly to bibtex, but it builds the glossary instead of the bibliography.
5. Run xelatex example.tex. This second run of pdflatex updates the build with the glossaries and references.
6. At this point, you should see an example.pdf file in the src directory. This is the completed build.

For ShareLaTeX Users

Due to licensing restrictions, ShareLaTeX is unable to distribute the Times New Roman font on their website. Therefore, you will need to upload your Times New Roman font files to ShareLaTeX. On my machine running Ubuntu 14.04, the font file was in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Times New Roman.ttf. This file needs to be uploaded to ShareLaTeX.

In addition to this, workreport.cls, frontmatter.sty, body.sty, and backmatter.sty need to be in the main working directory of your ShareLaTeX project.

Ensure that ShareLaTeX is using XeLaTeX to typeset your document. By default, the site will use pdflatex as the typesetting engine, but this can be changed in the project settings.

Lastly, some edits need to be made in workreport.cls, in order to let XeLaTeX know that we want to use the Times New Roman font from the .ttf file we just uploaded. Between lines 100 to 124, there is a command \setmainfont inside a \DeclareOption command. Search for the \setmainfont command and you should find it. Change its mandatory argument (the thing in curly braces { }), to the name of your Times New Roman ttf file. The document should compile.

Contributors

• Michal Kononenko (mkononen@uwaterloo.ca)
• Paulo Miguel (pmiguel@uwaterloo.ca)