Word-Processing Computer Science Lab Reports

General Comments

You may use any word processor you wish when writing up a lab report. If you use one on your own computer, the first issue you will confront is how to get the code you write in lab into the word-processing program on your computer. Fortunately, this is generally quite easy, assuming you are connected into the campus-wide network. If you don't already know how to do this, talk with one of the lab instructors or tutors, or some other student who has already figured it out.

At the end of this document, we will explain how to use one of the word processors available on the lab machines. You can obviously skip that if you are using your own word-processor. However, there are some general issues about writing your lab reports in a word-processor.

Most word processors allow you to choose a variety of fonts. Many of these are variable-width fonts, that is, fonts where certain letters (such as "w") are wider than other letters (such as "i"). This can look quite nice, but it unfortunately means that the indentation that DrScheme automatically does to your code, and which makes the code easier to read, will probably get messed up when done with a such a font. The solution is to select the individual pieces of code, and put them in a fixed-width font, such as the generally available Courier font.
In this lab, you will probably want to include some tables to present the empirical results you have collected. There are various technologies, such as spreadsheets, that you can use to create those tables. However, you can just as easily create nicely presented and easy to read tables in any word processor provided you follow some general rules:
- Have clearly labeled columns and rows.
- Round off your times consistently and with a reasonable number of digits.
- Line up your columns on the decimal point even if the decimal point isn't explicitly shown. For example, if a column contains 123 and 45, the 3 should appear immediately above the 5. (This might imply using a fixed-width font for the numbers.)

Using OpenOffice.org Writer

OpenOffice.org/Writer can be started from the Office sub-menu of the K-menu. After startup, you will get a fairly standard, untitled word-processing window which allows you to easily control font, fontsize, bold, etc. Rather than describing how to use a word processor (which you probably already know), let me make a few comments relating to the issues raised above.

Save your file to the same directory that contains the DrScheme code file. If you call it "lab2", it will be saved as "lab2.sxw".
To copy code from a DrScheme window to an OpenOffice.org/Writer window, you should first select (highlight) the portion of code you want to copy from the DrScheme window, next do a left single-click in the OpenOffice.org/Writer file to determine the position where it should go, and then do a middle click at that position.
To change the font of code you have inserted into OpenOffice.org/Writer to fixed-width, first select it, and then go to the font selection pull-down list towards the top of the window and select (for example) the "Courier" font.
At this point, your font should have the same indentation as it had in DrScheme. One possible additional problem is that the code is too wide to fit in the page, and you get some "line-wrapping". You should definitely take care of this, since it makes the code very difficult to read. The best thing to do is to make sure that your Scheme code is not to wide by using enough carriage returns in DrScheme. A second possibility is to reduce the size of the code's font in OpenOffice.org/Writer, which is done similarly to how you changed the font itself. However, please don't make it so small that we have difficulty reading it.

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