How can I write a simple report in LaTeX?

Here's the basics of what you need to do to make a report:

Put the following lines at the very top of your file, replacing "Your Name Here" and "Your Title Here" with the appropriate text.

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{2}
\author{Your Name Here}
\title{Your Title Here}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents

The first line says what sort of document to make (a report). The next line says to set the margins to 1 inch all around. The third line says to double space.

The next lines give the information to put on the title page.

The sixth line says "Start the document", and the seventh means "Make a titlepage, and put it here", and the eighth "Make a table of contents, and put it here".

Next, enter the text of your report. Where you want a chapter heading, put:

\chapter{Your Chapter Title Here}

You can also have other levels of header:

\section{Your Section title Here}
\subsection{Your Subsection title here}
\subsubsection{Your subsubsection title here}
\paragraph{Your paragraph title here}

It isn't necessary to use all these levels, and you probably wouldn't want to for most reports.

At the very bottom of your file, put:

	\end{document}

That's it! Now, you just need to run it through the formatter. To do this, save your file, and then type a command of the following form at the athena% prompt:

	latex filename

(You'll need to latex twice in a row the first time you do this, to make sure that the table of contents gets properly generated.) If there aren't any errors in formatting, this will produce a ".dvi" file. You can view what this file will look like printed out by typing:

	xdvi filename.dvi &

If you want to print it out, you'd type:

	dvips -Pprintername filename.dvi