What is important when delivering your Word-document for the lay-out of your dissertation?
A good layout of your thesis starts with you delivering a correct Word-document. With this, we do not necessarily refer to the readability or grammar but to the structure of your Word file. The Word document is not supposed to have a great lay-out, after all Persoonlijk Proefschrift will take care of that! So please do not worry about font types, alignment, margins or line spacing. But do make sure to read our tips on improving your document, to make it as transparent and easy to work on for our designers as possible.
1. Be consistent and clarify the structure of your text
Our designers will not look at the font types, alignment or line spacing you have used in Word. However, what is very important for them is the structure of the document. The structure of the text should be consistent to prevent the designer from going astray during the layout. Word offers the possibility of layout styles, which help you to make your document consistent. These Word layout styles enable you to make distinctions between chapter- and paragraph titles (main- and sub headings). An additional advantage of using these standard styles for the headers, is the possibility to use them to automatically make a table of content.
You can use the layout styles by selecting the chapter- or paragraph titles in Word, and subsequently click ‘Home’ -> ‘Styles’ -> ‘Heading 1’. In general, you will use ‘Heading 1’ for chapter titles, ‘Heading 2’ for paragraph titles and ‘Heading 3’ for sub paragraphs. If your dissertation has a different structure, of course you can apply different layout styles. However, it is important to always maintain the consistency throughout the document!
2. Figures of your dissertation in Word
Your designer will probably not use the figures from your Word document in the final lay-out of your thesis. This is because Word compresses the images, which will have a negative effect on the image quality of your dissertation. Therefore, we would like to emphasize the importance of the following tips if you deliver a Word document with figures.
Deliver the original files of the images
To guarantee a good quality of your dissertation, we advice you to send the original files of the figures separately from your Word document. These original files could have different extensions as for example .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .eps, .ai, .pdf. Our designers will not have any trouble working with most of these file types. Make sure to collect all original files of the figures that you would like to use in your thesis. If you deliver these files separately to us, you will have a good chance that the quality is sufficient.
Indicate where the figures should be placed in the text
If you send the original figures separately from your Word document, we recommend you to add notes in the text where you would like to place these figures. The designer will then make sure to lay-out your dissertation in a way that the figures are placed correctly in the text. It is also possible to leave an image on the correct place in the Word file, your designer will then replace this image with the original figure.
3. Tables of your dissertation in Word
Most of the people will be familiar with tables in Word. You can add a table by clicking the tab ‘Insert’ in the menu, followed by clicking ‘Table’. If you move the cursor over the raster, you can mark the required number of rows and columns.
If you would like to have more than 10 columns or rows in a table, you can use the option ‘Insert Table’. This can be found by clicking ‘Insert’ -> ‘Table’ -> ‘Insert Table…’.
Some additional tips for the use of tables in a dissertation
- It is not necessary to split a table if it will be spread over more than one page. If you do this, you will create two separate tables that our designers will have to merge together again. It is more convenient to let your tables continue over more pages.
- Besides that, we would like to advice you to not lay-out your tables to a higher extent than adding heading styles. The size of your thesis will usually be different than the size of a Word document. Your designer will make sure that the table fits the page in the best layout possible. Therefore, it would be a waste of your time to already put a lot of effort into the lay-out of your tables in Word. However, it is important to clearly mark the structure of a table. This could be done by assigning the headers a bold layout.
- It is not necessary to deliver your tables to us in separate files. Your designer will be able to lay-out these directly out of the Word file. It is also possible for your designer to work with tables you have copied out of Excel to Word.