ISE website has an archive for technical reports and working papers. This page describes steps to generate technical report in technical report format.

There is a latex style file called “isetechreport.sty” written by Dr. Ralphs and Dr. Curtis. For your paper in latex format you can use this package to create technical reports. Lets say your paper is in specific journal format. You can edit your tex file so that it can generate technical report or journal format paper. To achieve this user can add a latex package called “ifthen” to her tex file. Using this package if else statements can be used in latex tex files. Then using a simple variable to control the output format user can generate both technical reports and journal papers. You can also hide the unwanted sections for one of the formats (ex. keywords may be needed for journal but not for tech report).

Technical report package can be used with ifthen package. ifthen package provides command \ifthenelse which is used as follows,

\ifthenelse{\coralreport = 1}{
 This part will be active if coralreport variable is 1.
}
{
 This part is active if coralreport variable is not 1.
}

If no action is required then you can skip the content. The following shows the case where no action is required when coralreport is not 1.

\ifthenelse{\coralreport = 1}{
 This part will be active if coralreport variable is 1.
}
{}

See tech_report_example.tex for an example.

In the example output is controlled by \def\coralreport{1} on the first line. If the value given to coralreport variable is 1, then technical report will be produced, journal paper otherwise.

In line 5 of the example we add the required ifthen package.

At line 37-54 we add isetechreport package using ifthenelse command. We also insert the title page information. Latex will use this information if coralreport variable is 1, ignore otherwise. You should edit this section for your report.

There are three more variables defined in lines 50-52. This variables determine the type of the technical report. There are three types of technical reports, coral, cvcr and ise. Example shows the case where we want an ISE technical report. If you want a different type you should edit this section (ex, for a coral report /coraltrue /cvcrfalse /isefalse).

In lines 60-70 we specify the authors. This example illustrates the case where different format of authors is used for journal and tech report. Again ifthenelse command is used to use the right format for each case.

In lines 85-89 ifthenelse command is used to add the keywords for journal format.

For this user needs two files. (1) cover.txt and (2) her report in MS Word format. Her report should be named as report.doc. cover.txt and report.doc should be in the same directory. Then she should call “make_tech_rep.sh” from this directory. cover.txt contains information regading the tech report. User can create this file by copying and editing this.

This should be done in polyp1.

All necessary scripts for this process are located on /home/software/convert/. It is already on every user's PATH.

If you wish you can clone the isetechincalreport package from the git repo on coral with

 git clone your_user_id@coral.ie.lehigh.edu:/srv/git/isetechreport 

and move it to a folder within access of your Texworks or other Latex distribution. Then, simply add

\usepackage{isetechreport}
% Report year and no                                            
\def\reportyear{16T}                                                     
\def\reportno{005}                                                       
%% This is the revision number (increment for each revision)              
\def\revisionno{0}                                                       
%% This is the date f the original report                                 
\def\originaldate{May 30, 2016}                                          
%% This is the date of the latest revision                                
\def\revisiondate{May 30, 2016}                                          
%% Set these variables according to whether this should be a CORAL or CVCR
%% report                                                                 
\coralfalse                                                              
\cvcrfalse                                                               
\isetrue

to your preamble. To generate a cover page, you need to call

\titlepage

before your \maketitle command.

If you have any kind of error that has to do with the tabular environment, please first make sure you are using the latest version of the tech report package, as a bug related to this was fixed (see above). Although it should not be necessary, please also make sure that you have added the \titlepage command in your document. Finally, if you have a \noindent error when compiling with latex, try getting rid of any \centering commands inside the tabular elements. If you are still having trouble, feel free to ask.