- Plain text input - Edit your file on any platform, any editor, across SSH, on your PDA, on your phone. Your files are also smaller, work sanely with revision control systems, and can be pre-processed by almost anything.
- Scalabily - The report should be about "12,000-18,000 words" in length. Have you ever tried using a Word document this big? Judicial use of the \include directive can split your report into multiple files, which will probably aid concentration by minimising costly context switching to other parts of the report.
- Math support - LaTeX is famous for it's capabilities in typesetting mathematical formulas. Compare Dr. Nullity's Word/Mathtype-based papers with some better examples.
- Generates PDF - Generating PDFs using LaTeX is trivial and doesn't require any printer driver hacks. Great for creating drafts. Maybe use the Warwick-made PDFjam too.
- Beamer - Beamer is an add-on module which allows you to create high-quality presentation files in LaTeX. Not only does this give you all the other advantages of LaTeX, as the output format is PDF there are no OpenOffice/Powerpoint conversion issues. Find out more at the homepage or check out Odd_Bloke's WUGLUG tutorial.
- Installable everywhere - LaTeX is available for pretty much every platform and if that wasn't enough, it's installed on Joshua, Primrose and Molotov. MiKTeX is the MS Windows implementation.
- BibTeX - We are asked to "be consistent with [citation] style": BibTeX makes this ridiculously easy. In addition, as it only displays references that were cited in the document you can use a BibTeX file to store bibliographical references to articles and research you are currently working on.
- Free - LaTeX is free software, meaning it can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed with minimal restrictions. Does anyone have a legal copy of Word?
So give LaTeX a try; there is plenty of documentation to help you get started.
(Purists note: I'm blurring the lines between LaTeX and TeX. Read the LaTeX article on Wikipedia for more)
Some good points - I might give it a go over the vacation, before I get into any serious documentation writing and it's too late to change.
Dave