Choosing a font for thesis

[cazlar]

actually i take it all back, it is a time-tested procrastination technique to hit up your favorite forum and ask for font advice

Bingo. I've got to the stage where I don't feel like doing any more writing (let alone more experiments), so font selection suddenly seems very important (although I know it's not really).

Although as MatthewCobb says, it's likely that only my examiners (and maybe some lab members) will ever look at it, I think I'd prefer not to open my thesis and have my first reaction be "ugh, Times New Roman". After all, it's the closest thing to a book that I'll ever produce, I might as well have something that I find pleasing at least.

 

[balamw]

After all, it's the closest thing to a book that I'll ever produce, I might as well have something that I find pleasing at least.

Bingo. Even if noone ever reads the *&#%$ thing, that document will follow you and you should at least be happy with how it looks...

(I've actually referred to my dissertation about once a year for the past 10 years for equations or references, so when I pick it up I don't want to see something ugly.)

B

 

[iMeowbot]

If you're looking for more ways to procrastinate, look for this book. There's a chapter that touches on all this font business in papers. Partial text at Google.

 

[thequicksilver]

As I prefer sans serif faces I have always used my favourite one of these - Optima. But of those I have (ie the faces included with OS X) if I had to choose a serif one, it would probably be Garamond.

Then again, I've never agreed with the whole "legibility" issue with faces. Sure, something like Times is more legible than some of the more obnoxious sans serif faces like Impact, but provided you make a sensible choice (Optima, Helvetica, etc) then provided it's at a sensible size I certainly wouldn't preclude sans serif faces purely for legibility reasons.

 

[RedTomato]

I strongly reccomend Ransom. Invented by Apple, and used to sell their printers, it was quite a popular font for business letters back in the 70's.

I did my post-PhD thesis in Ransom, all 150 pages of it, and everyone remarked on the font when I handed it in.

Highly recomended indeed.

 

[telecomm]

What about Garamond? I wrote my MA thesis using that font for the body text.

 

[notjustjay]

For what it's worth, the default font that LaTeX uses is called Computer Modern.

I know there's already been a bit of anti-LaTeX sentiment in this thread, which is unfortunate because it really is amazing for papers and theses. I was writing my Master's thesis in Word but soon became blocked. What's more, the document had become so big and unwieldy that Word eventually crashed -- and took my document with it! I was able to resurrect it, but I was so PO'd at Word that I immediately took the plunge and converted everything to LaTeX.

I used TeXShop on my Mac which is a very good, almost WYSIWYG editor (type the codes in one window, see the PDF preview in another, side by side). I took advantage of LaTeX's ability to have individual chapters saved as individual files and then all included into a master file. The reorganization made it all easier for me to manage and helped unblock me, too.

It also made formatting a no-brainer. I just downloaded an existing thesis template from the web, modified it a little bit to meet the particular requirements for my school, and all was done. Chapter headings, page numbering, headers and footers, tables of contents, lists of figures, captions, all properly numbered and referenced. All automatically.

Plus, there's just something magical about taking your document and applying one of the pre-formatted templates for theses, technical papers, etc. and suddenly seeing everything look.. for lack of a better word... legitimate. Since so many papers use LaTeX templates, mine suddenly felt like a research paper. That made me feel good.

Also, if you use a lot of math, equations, proofs, lots of footnotes, etc. you will soon come to appreciate how easy it is to make these work in LaTeX.

Writing LaTeX "code" is a bit like writing HTML, so if you're familiar with that, it's not a stretch to learn.

 

[weg]

Arial?

*ouch* Arial is a sans-serif typeface, for longer texts you should always use serif typefaces (Times, Palatino, etc.). Serifs are the short lines stemming from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter (according to Webster ;-)). These appendixes have the purpose of helping the reader's eye connect all the sequence of letters.

That said, just stick to Times (New Roman). You're writing a thesis, not a fancy magazine.

 

[weg]

I strongly reccomend Ransom. Invented by Apple, and used to sell their printers, it was quite a popular font for business letters back in the 70's.

I did my post-PhD thesis in Ransom, all 150 pages of it, and everyone remarked on the font when I handed it in.

Highly recomended indeed.

You used this:

for your PhD Thesis??? Did you write a PhD thesis in criminology??
EDIT: And what kind of "business letters" are you talking about *rotfl*

 

[Macman45]

You used this:

Image

for your PhD Thesis??? Did you write a PhD thesis in criminology??
EDIT: And what kind of "business letters" are you talking about *rotfl*

I used to mark and proofread. In the UK, Times New Roman and Arial are the expected standards, Garamond? No, and using Ransom, whilst mildly amusing the reader just isn't going to work.

 

[arkitect]

I used to mark and proofread. In the UK, Times New Roman and Arial are the expected standards, Garamond? No, and using Ransom, whilst mildly amusing the reader just isn't going to work.

And a Spammer succeeds in another bit of thread necrophilia…

Edit: Of course now that the spammer has been removed my post seems pointless (as are most of my others I suspect).