Two problems with my thesis remain:
(1) I have to write an abstract of 300 words. This shouldn’t be too hard. I wrote 150 words as part of a job application two days ago and it’s not a lot. Might be a bit of a problem to squeeze my 100000 words (volume of thesis) into 300 but there you go. I’m going to try and write it on Thursday and will report here how it went.
(2) Footnotes!! Word!! These two don’t go together too well. After finally solving the Document map problem (here’s how), I’m now bothered by the footnotes going all over the place and certainly not on the page where they’re supposed to be. One author suggests to “not to make your footnotes too long and avoid having two or more very close together (in case they are both positioned on the same line of text …)”. W00t? I NEED some of the footnotes to be long. I think it’s M$’ responsibility to write software that actually functions properly. I’m going to try and solve this (once I’ve written the abstract, see above) and will use Using Microsoft Word for a Thesis as a guideline. Here’s hoping..
I can’t imagine writing a thesis in Word. Or OpenOffice.
It would definitelu put me into trouble with the look and one change could ruin the whole document.
I write my thesis in LaTeX and I can can purely concentrate on the content. LaTeX will typeset the whole document, no matter what the text inside, how many and how long footnotes. And I noticed one thing… the more I tried to tamper with it, the worse it looks. So I just keep the defaults and just type my paragraphs.
I ran into this same problem with the footnotes in my Master’s thesis, as well as the last article I wrote, and I think I solved it by changing either the font size or the line spacing to “exactly” 12 point. Somehow that’s how Word figures out how to place all the footnotes on the right page. Hmmmm. I guess it’s something I’ll have to solve again when I get to your stage in my own diss. Good luck!
thanks for your comments - automatthias, a friend of mine from years ago tried to get me to use LaTeX but to be honest I never got my head around it. I guess it’s too late now.. I might engage with alternatives to Turd (Word) after my thesis is done and dusted. I’m trying to get away from M$ anyway so it would be a step in the right direction.
Ms Clio - I’ll certainly try that! Though I think my style guidelines prescribe the font of footnotes to be 10 point. It’s all set in stone unfortunately
. I haven’t tried solving the problem yet though. It’ll have to wait until the very end as I still have a final meeting with my supervisors outstanding. Any changes after the meeting will otherwise mess it all up again!