Showcase: Zhen’s thesis

The Academic Type was very dedicated to making the layout of my dissertation look more professional. They responded quickly to all my requirements and are very efficient.

Zhen Chen

Goal

Zhen came to us in a rush: her PhD defence was near, her thesis needed to be printed soon, but the thesis layout was not to her satisfaction. She converted her Page document to Word and PDF, however there were unexpected errors here and there. She wanted the errors to be fixed and her thesis to have a simple yet effective layout. She also wanted the Chinese content in her thesis properly typeset as well.

Duration

We started her project on 4 June and delivered the first draft 3 days later. After rounds of discussions and revisions, the final version was settled 14 June. We finished the whole project within 10 days.

Improvement

Short Table of Contents

We reorganised the short table of contents to make it more overseeable.

Extended Table of Contents

The original extended table of contents had several issues.

We improved it by:

• changing the page numbers in the front matter to Roman numerals;
• indenting entries to make the table more readable;
• ensuring that no entries hung over into the page number section; and
• making sure that the page numbers of the table itself could not be confused with page numbers within the actual table.

Title Spacing

As may happen when working with Word or Pages, the spacing of the section titles throughout the thesis was inconsistent. The spacing in many cases also left too little room between the title and the body. We fixed these issues by ensuring uniform and pleasurable spacing.

Footnotes

We made sure that the footnotes took up less space than they did originally. Zhen also preferred a particular style of footnotes which we implemented successfully.

Headers

The thesis had many chapters and was over 400 pages, which made it difficult for readers to locate where they were. For this reason we added a visual clue in the header of chapters so that the reader would know easily to what chapter she had turned.

Conclusion

Word and Pages are useful programs for writing up a document, but they can be tricky to use when attempting to make a visually consistent document that comes across as professional. Within 10 days, we efficiently enhanced the look of the thesis to the satisfaction of Zhen. If you are in a similar situation, please contact us and we would like to offer our most efficient, responsive, and professional help.