Writing

      CS 736 Page

Latex or Word? Latex!

I strongly recommend/require LaTeX

You will definitely use LaTeX for writing academic/scientific papers. It is an excellent tool. You might feel scared at first, but it is definitely worth spending some amount of time learning how to use it. You can find templates and examples at this SIGPLAN website.

How to draw figure

gnuplot is recommended for drawing figures. Gnuplot is an effective tool to process experiment data and generate (relatively) nice encapsulated postscript (eps) files to use within LaTeX.

You can use Microsoft Excel as well, but you need to print the graph as pdf (or ps) and then crop it to use in the paper (professional Acrobat or ghostview can do this).

Some hints on the writing:

The Science of Scientific Writing