Preparation of technical reports can be unwieldy. However, a significant proportion of the document structure is often standardised. The GFZ Report Generator is a Python 2.7 application meant to ease this process by (i) automatically generating the standardised figures and tables, (ii) creating a report template pre-filled with this standard content, and which meets the GFZ style requirements, and (iii) providing a browser-based GUI with a text editor where users can add content to the report, generate and inspect the HTML and PDF versions on the fly as they are editing, track changes and revert to previous versions, and easily control the document structure and formatting from within the text by typing special characters in reStructuredText, an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax.

The GFZ Report Generator is quite flexible and by the use of tailor-made templates can be adapted easily to other use cases, where part of a document is based on standardised figures and section structure. For example, the software is deployed at GEOFON to generate both seismic network reports and annual reports. For the former, GEOFON also offers an online service (https://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/waveform/reportgenerator/) where PIs and others can easily generate report templates pre-filled with network-specific content (e.g., probability density functions plots) and available online for editing. In this process, the deployed instance of the GFZ Report Generator proved to be useful for finding some classes of problems with the data and metadata stored at GEOFON.