UKTeX Digest Friday, 21 Aug 1992 Volume 92 : Issue 32 ``The UKTeX Digest is brought to you as a free, unfunded and voluntary service of the UK TeX Users Group and the UK TeX Archive.'' Today's Topics: {Q&A}: Doublespacing in LaTeX Re: Doublespacing in LaTeX Administrivia: Moderators: Peter Abbott (Aston University) and David Osborne (University of Nottingham) Contributions: UKTeX@uk.ac.tex Administration, subscription and unsubscription requests: UKTeX-request@uk.ac.tex ------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 16:49:28 +0000 From: Owen Boyle Subject: Doublespacing in LaTeX Hi, Some months ago, Mark Gallagher, a Ph.D. student from Hull, wrote in complaining about being constrained to produce his thesis in double-spacing - an anathema to LaTeX. I recall reading a subsequent note in which a very competent riposte to the advocates of doublespacing was published. For the life of me, I cannot find this note despite having saved all Digests since. I am beginning to think I must have dreamt about it. Has anybody got a copy of this reply ? The original note (from MG) appeared in issue #22 titled "Thesis Submission". Best Regards, Owen Boyle, LUT ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 09:48:29 +0000 From: David Osborne Subject: Re: Doublespacing in LaTeX In a message of 17 Aug 92 17:42:03 GMT, Owen Boyle said: > Some months ago, Mark Gallagher, a Ph.D. student from Hull, wrote in complai > ning about being constrained to produce his thesis in double-spacing - an an > athema to LaTeX. > > I recall reading a subsequent note in which a very competent riposte to the > advocates of doublespacing was published. For the life of me, I cannot find > this note despite having saved all Digests since. > > I am beginning to think I must have dreamt about it. You were perhaps thinking of a parallel discussion which took place in TeXhax Digest, issues V92 #009, #011 and #012. Here are the relevant articles: TeXhax Digest Wednesday, 3 Jun 1992 Volume 92 : Issue 009 Date: Mon, 20 Apr 92 15:28:56 +0000 From: David_Rhead@uk.ac.nott.vme Subject: Regulations for theses Keywords: theses, regulations From time to time, I've seen queries in TeXhax along the lines My university's regulations specify that theses should have double-spacing or one-and-a-half line-spacing. How can I get LaTeX to do this? to which Leslie Lamport would reply along the lines My advice in all such cases is to get your college to modify its obsolete requirements, which were developed for typewriters, not laserprinters. (For example, there was such an exchange dated 8th June 1988.) I think Leslie is right, and that universities should modify their regulations. But we rarely get to hear "what happened next?". Did the enquirer manage to get his/her institution to change their outdated regulations? What proportion of institutions have changed their regulations? What proportion have changes under consideration? In the UK, there has been some progress: * the British Standard for theses (BS 4821) now allows standard typesetting conventions for "typeset" theses. (It takes careful analysis of their wording to deduce this. But I've had indirect confirmation from the chair of the BS committee that this was their intention.) Associated with this is a recommendation that lines should contain between 60 and 70 characters (including spaces). * York cites BS 4821, and suggests that people contact the York computing service for advice about typography. * I seem to remember hearing that Cranfield requires single-spacing. * Oxford has a nice phrase about "output ... imitates letterpress, then the layout may be that of a well-designed book". * Nottingham regulations say that the combination of standard LateX line-spacing and line-length is OK for postgraduate theses. We still have problems with undergraduate reports (since each department makes its own regulations, so its more difficult to negotiate with them all), but I anticipate that we'll get "if typesetting, then adopt typesetting conventions" into most undergraduate regulations within the next year. * I have the impression that many places adopt a pragmatic attitude "if it looks alright, it is alright" rather than bothering what the letter of the regulations actually say. * On the other hand, I was in e-mail correspondence with someone at Edinburgh last year who had to make a formal appeal to get his "standard typesetting line-spacing" thesis accepted. (Otherwise, he'd have had to re-format with increased spacing, re-print and re-bind.) I understand that his appeal succeeded, but I don't know whether that means that other Edinburgh people can now be confident that if their thesis is done "like a well-designed book", it will get past the bureaucrats. Arguments I've found useful are: * Draw people's attention to experimental results on readability as shown, for example, on page 179 of Richard Rubinstein's "Digital Typography" ISBN 0-201-17633-5. The gist of it is that "standard typesetting conventions give typeset text that is nearly optimal for continuous reading". Hence one can say "Do you really want to make your thesis more difficult to read than it would be with standard typesetting conventions?". * Quote the Oxford regulations about "well-designed book". (Prestigeous place, Oxford!) * In the UK, quote the British Standard. * To people who say that they want the inter-line space for examiners to scribble comments, point out that "well-designed books" limit their line-length so, in practice on A4, examiners will get big side margins in which to scribble. * If someone is arguing that "double-spaced is easier to read", and they have a traditionally typeset book on their desk, ask "do you think that this book would have been easier to read if its line-spacing had been drastically increased?" * If someone is arguing that "double-spaced is easier to read", and you know that they edit a journal, note that "but you don't have such line-spacing when your journal is printed". * Quote books on typography at them. Would any readers like to share their experiences of what is a successful strategy for getting their regulations changed (or circumvented), or to report dismal failures? Are LaTeX style-files such as MITTHESIS.STY, UCTHESIS.STY and SUTHESIS.STY (which increase the line-spacing "as the typewriter-oriented regulations require") now heading for obsolescence? David Rhead JANET: d.rhead@uk.ac.nottingham.ccc.vme ------------------------------ TeXhax Digest Thursday, 18 Jun 1992 Volume 92 : Issue 011 Date: Wed, 03 Jun 92 15:21:56 -0500 From: JERRY LEICHTER Subject: re: Regulations for theses Keywords: theses, regulations David Rhead asks for experiences with typeset theses. Here's one experience from the US: Yale University accepts the LaTeX standard styles, with the default settings. There's a bit of a story here, though. The first dissertation printed this way at Yale was John Ellis's, back in about 1986 or 1987. Several subsequent theses were set "double spaced", and when it came time for me to prepare my thesis in 1989, it had become folk wisdom among those I talked to that "the university requires double spacing". I decided to ask John how he'd gotten away with it, since everyone else was apparently running into a bureaucratic brick wall. It turns out he didn't need to do anything special. He printed up a small sample as he wished the whole thing to appear and sought out the one person with final say on thesis formats - a woman who's been doing the job for many years. She was apparently impressed and very pleased to see such high-qualit y output. She didn't raise any objections to the non-double-spacing; in fact, she just wished all theses could look as good as John's. About a year later, Josh Benaloh used a modified form of John's style and got a single-spaced thesis accepted. Following in John's tracks, I also brought a sample along to the appropriate office. Since "everyone knew" that double spacing was required, I also brought one with a linestretch of about 1.2 - the least I could use that might still fool someone into thinking the text was "double spaced". The "final authority" who John had talked to wasn't in that day, but other people in the office saw no problem with my "single-spaced" sample. I left it with them for final vetting by the "authority"; it was granted with no questions a couple of days later. The actual style I used was a minor variation of article. Most of the variation was stylistic - e.g., I used bold san serif for heads. I also modified the text width and height to match the published university requirements. These modifications, which I inherited from Josh's style, were quite small, and frankly I doubt anyone would have noticed or cared if I hadn't made them. So where did the belief that "double spacing is REQUIRED" come from? Who knows! No one chose to ask - people just parroted what they had heard. At least one other thesis, Ruben Michel's, used my settings. Another group at Yale produced an independent "yalethesis" style option. It had a great many special hacks in it, some of them again alleged to be "university requirements". For example, they were somehow led to believe that Yale required the bibliography to appear before the appendices. I put it after (which seemed much more logical) and no one complained. Again, the power of "everyone knows that ...". In any case, several theses using this style, which uses normal linespacing, have been accepted. So you can definitely count Yale in as a typographically enlightened place. The moral of the story: Things may not be as bad as you are led to believe. Don't take rumors and stories and even dog-eared specifications printed up years ago at face value: Talk to the people who actually make the decisions. You may find them more reasonable than you expect. It's a BIG help to bring along a couple of samples to show how the text SHOULD look, and how it would look if "double spaced". If there are any questions about what might be acceptable, try and get the official in charge to note on your sample that it is acceptable, and sign and date it. This should help avoid last-minute problems. BTW, there are many ways to play the game hardball. For example, if the spec says "double spacing", print the double-spaced sample with a baseline stretch of 2. It will look TERRIBLE. (Typewriter double spacing is really much closer to a baseline stretch of 1.5.) If it looks as if getting single spacing is going to be impossible, try and get away with as small a baseline stretch as you can. If presented in isolation, a baseline stretch of 1.2 can look pretty "double-spaced", and while hardly ideal it's not as bad as it might be. You can make it look even better in comparison by preparing a "single spaced" document with a baseline stretch of, oh, .9 or so. (This is only SLIGHTLY cheating - single spaced typewriter text is VERY tight, which i s why the whole demand for double spacing appeared in the first place. So don' t describe it in typographical terms - describe it as "like typewriter single spacing", which it is.) And, of course, chose for your sample a page that will really show off what decent typesetting can do: Sections with nice heads, perhaps a nice graphic figure, beautiful mathematical formulas if appropriate, and so on. Keep 'em looking at the positive and they may forget about "the rules". -- Jerry ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 07 Jun 92 05:19:57 -0600 From: Ralph Johnson Subject: Regulations for theses Keywords: theses, regulations In the U.S., all theses are given to University Microfilms, a company that will reconstitute theses on demand and for a fee. Both Cornell and U. of Illinois claim that this company requires double spacing to reduce errors during this process. I am not sure that this is true, but it is an argument that is hard to refute. Are their any U.S. schools that permit single-spacing? The common solution is to make two versions of the thesis, one that is ugly for the university, and one that is formatted correctly for departmental tech reports, for distribution electronically, etc. Ralph Johnson -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ------------------------------ TeXhax Digest Thursday, 25 Jun 1992 Volume 92 : Issue 012 Date: Mon, 08 Jun 92 17:16:45 -0800 From: mackay@edu.washington.cs Subject: Typesetting for Theses (TeXhax Digest V92 #009) Keywords: theses, regulations To follow up on David Rhead's very useful remarks, I should like to ask whether any antiquarians within reach of TeXhax can locate some history of the fight (which must have occurred) over allowing the grubby mechanical typescript to be submitted as a final copy of the thesis in the first place. I'll bet it was fierce, and it is richly comic to have Graduate School Bureaucrats now standing firmly in the way of a return to typesetting quality---and they do. Properly spaced typesetter fonts look terrible when printed with typewriter linespacing. If that is what your Graduate School insists on, you might just as well set everything in Adobe Courier, and have done with it. Email concerned with UnixTeX distribution software should be sent primarily to: elisabet@max.u.washington.edu Elizabeth Tachikawa otherwise to: mackay@cs.washington.edu Pierre A. 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