indesign phd thesis template

ORGANIZING CREATIVITY

How to generate, capture, and collect ideas to realize creative projects., using indesign to layout your dissertation thesis.

2015-01-28 Daniel Doing Science , Improving your Creativity , Learning to do Science , Other Programs , Realizing Creative Projects , Science , Scrivener , Tools , Writing 8

INDESIGN for PHD thesis? Mad, I tell you, MAD!! Comment on Twitter regarding the use of InDesign for a thesis

Scrivener is really great software for writing, esp. longer texts like a dissertation. However, it’s output options are a bit limited if you want to have decent formatting. It’s designed to write text, not to do layout. This isn’t a problem if you just need to produce a document you can give your supervisor for feedback, as you can simply compile the (necessary parts of the) Scrivener document as Word document or PDF (e.g., in APA paper style). But when you need to format your thesis for submission you might need another program.

The easiest way is probably to use Microsoft Word. You find a few tips regarding headers and footnotes in this posting . But personally, I avoid using Word whenever I can. And I used InDesign to format my thesis for the submission version (the ones which ended up in the university library).

However, InDesign is a professional DTP program and not exactly easy to understand. A reader (John) asked me about tips regarding InDesign . That’s a hard question without knowing how well the person already understands InDesign. Furthermore, there are enough instructions on using InDesign online and I don’t want to compete with them.

But what I can do is to provide the file I used for my Dissertation thesis. It’s my thesis document, although I removed the text and the images to make it more template like (zipped .indd file).

But at the very least, it shows, among others, the different layers I used (not many, just one for the cover background, one for the text and one for images), the paragraph styles (important for creating the Table of Contents, including separate ones for figures and tables), the character styles, and a couple of other things.

If I remember correctly (did the thesis about 5 years ago), after creating the standard pages like cover and imprint, I started with copy-pasting the text from a compiled Scrivener document (using Word output, IIRC) into the page textbox (automatically created the necessary number of pages). I then manually formatted the text (e.g., headers) and inserted the footnotes in InDesign. Then I went through the thesis and inserted the tables and images, formatting them as needed. I used placeholder text like “Insert Figure xxx here” when writing the thesis with Scrivener. Note that when you work with figures/tables, you can either put them as objects on a specific page (will not move with text) or insert them as part of the text. Both ways work and the first one will always stay at this position, the second one will move with the text. If an image/table is near the start/end of a page, you might want to insert it independently of the text flow. Take care to use specific paragraph styles for the figures and another one for the tables to create these independent table of contents.

But whatever you do, only start doing the thesis with InDesign when you are sure that there will be no more changes.

Personally, I used InDesign because I had already used it for just-for-fun books and found it more stable and practical than Word. And I didn’t mind the manual work. So formatting a thesis with InDesign is doable, but you will curse while doing it. But whether you will curse more or less than when using Word, I cannot say. If you already know InDesign or are willing to learn it, and your thesis is similar in structure to mine, I’d say probably less. However, I would be skeptical of using InDesign for a thesis that uses a lot of mathematical notations. But then, people working a lot of those usually use LaTeX anyway.

BTW, if you have specific questions or problems when using InDesign for a thesis, leave a comment (also if you tried it and it worked). Just keep in mind that this is my just-for-fun site. I cannot promise a working solution in advance (well, no one can) and I can’t promise that I reply immediately.

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OK, now this is getting a bit weird: first DevonThink, then Scrivener, and now InDesign. This is my planned workflow!

Am I following in your footsteps? Am I shadowing you?

Well, first of all, some programs are simply very well done. And then there’s a selection bias: You likely searched for one program first, and with all the blogs dealing with organizing, there had to be one covering the other ones as well.

I’ll be writing my Masters thesis in Architecture next year and doing it in anything other than InDesign seems nuts to me. I need to have full control over formatting and I need it to be reliable and consistent. Not qualities that Word is known for. However, Word has it’s uses. Here’s the workflow that I have used in the past and it seems to work quite well.

– Use Zotero to create a database of your references. Zotero is free, excellent and has kickass support in Word. It makes inserting citations into our document a complete no brainer and also will create a bibliography/references page in whatever style.

– Write the body of your thesis in Word. Be sure to set up some basic styles like a range of headers, etc. Name them something specific to your thesis, you could prefix style names with a few letters that are meaningful in the context of your thesis. For example, TP-Heading-1, TP-Heading-2, TP-Footnote, etc. (TP are my initials).

– PLACE your Word document into a new InDesign file. Be sure to tick “Show Import Options”. This is where the magic happens. InDesign will import your word document with all the formatting AND it will automatically create all the styles you have created in Word (TP-Heading-1, etc).

– Now all you have to do is place the pages and tweak the newly defined styles to achieve your desired look.

So, use Word to write the words and us InDesign to format your document.

cheers, -tomek

hey, using the import options is a great way to save a lot of time. Great idea 🙂

(It would probably be also possible to write the thesis in Scrivener, then compile it as word document, perhaps tidy up the formatting style names, and then import it in InDesign. That would probably lead to easy writing and high control over the formatting. Edit: Hmm, although not sure about the formatting styles and Zotero integration when writing with Scrivener. Anyway, great workflow, esp. for those working on Windows — I’ve made a posting out of it.)

Best regards

I’ve actually revised my workflow recently because I became frustrated with Zotero and Word. I have since switched to using Google Docs and Paperpile which is a great cloud-based citation and reference manager ( https://paperpile.com/app ).

My new workflow is still basically the same as in my first post except:

– I write the main body of text in Google Docs and use Paperpile to manage citations.

– I export Google Doc as Rich Text (you can alternatively export in Word format but the less I have to do with Word the happier I am).

– Place the RTF document with import setup.

Note: Google Docs doesn’t let you name styles present in the document. You can only create styles called Heading 1, 2, 3, etc. But once you’ve create a “heading” style you can set it up any way you want. It makes it a bit more tricky mapping Doc styles to Id styles but it’s doable and you only have to do it a few times when you’re first seting up.

use zotero as a reference manager and then this script in indesign: https://github.com/ka1/zot2indd they work perfectly; it seems a bit complicated at a first glance, but it is in fact very straightforward once you get the used to it

Thank you Paola, that looks very interesting (and useful) 🙂

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On Laying Out your Thesis in InDesign

Most students in the school of architecture are fairly well versed in the use of InDesign for laying out documents. The thesis document that every master’s student needs to complete in order to acquire their degree is yet another one of these documents but with a few specific technical requirements that makes it a thesis book. Some of you may already know about all these features in InDesign and have your own way of putting together a book, but I’d like to share some of my experiences and methods I’ve learned while laying out my own thesis.

On requirements from the University:

I’ll begin at the beginning, the following are my notes on the formatting requirements from the university. It is advisable to take these into account early on so there are less formatting revisions required at the end for the submission to UWSpace. See this University of Waterloo webpage for the original information.

Typography:

Font size – 10-12 (main) maybe smaller (footnotes/charts)
Serif typeface (Times New Roman, Palatino etc.) – I kind of ignored this and it was ok
Consistency in title, heading, footing.
Each page should include a minimum 1 inch (72 points) margin at the top, bottom, and outer edge of each page. A minimum 1 1/8 inch (81 points) gutter margin should be included for printed copies. Wider margins, as part of an overall graphic design, are acceptable.
Running headers may be placed outside the margins but not closer than 15mm from the outer edges of a page.
Consistent British or American spelling

Organization:

The page number is omitted from the Title page, although it is considered page i.
Front matter pages are numbered with lower case Roman numerals, beginning with the Author’s Declaration (page ii) following the title page.
Arabic numerals are used for all pages in the Text (main body) and Back matter.
Each chapter/section must begin on a separate page.
The text (main body) of the thesis begins with page number “1,” placed in the centre at the bottom . – this item is strict… must be centred bottom
All pages in the Text (main body) and Back matter must be numbered consecutively.

Order of items

See this sample for details on formatting the title page

The Author’s Declaration page must appear as follows:

“I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners.   I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public.”

Sourcing/ Bibliographies:

use RefWorks… see librarian for help with resource if necessary

On setting up an InDesign book:

If you anticipate a large file for your thesis, it may be advisable to make separate InDesign documents for each chapter and then combining them into an InDesign book. This introduces a bit of complications but may be worth it if your computer starts to lag with the large file.

Making an InDesign book is fairly straightforward:

When you create an InDesign document the first page is generally on the right hand side (an odd page), so when you combined the documents in a book using the “continue from previous page” option that right hand page may become a left hand page (an even page) and screw up the spread layout that you have designed
Choosing either the “continue on next even/odd page” will allow the document to insert a blank page to the previous document if necessary to keep the spread layout in tact.

Note: you are able to sync all your paragraph and character styles to all your documents through the book control panel, you can set up all your styles in a designated master document and sync it to the rest. Alternatively, you can create a style in any document and import it to the master then sync it to the rest.

On using paragraph and character styles:

Styles are great to setup not just for consistent formatting but also for simplifying the hassle of doing referencing and figure listing, table of contents too – if you want to go that far.

First thing to know about styles is when to create a paragraph style vs. a character style:

Sample paragraph styles

Sample character styles

*The following sections will describe how you use these paragraph styles to create endnotes and generate a figure list

Character styles override the appearance of text in the paragraph styles, choosing [none] in character styles would revert the text back to the default character style set by the paragraph style. You can create paragraph and character styles as you see fit for your desired layout. InDesign uses paragraph styles to generate a Table of Contents that updates automatically when you edit the text or when the page number changes.

I was too late in my game to implement this, but there is a program called WordsFlow that allows Word documents to be synced in InDesign. This way, you can place the text, apply the formatting, edit the text and it will update on both Word and InDesign. Unfortunately, since I never used the program, I can’t vouch for the success of the program. However, if it does then you can simply use Word to do your endnotes and disregard the next section.

On doing endnotes with cross-references:

InDesign has the function to do footnotes under the “type” menu so I won’t go into that. Following is the method I used to make my endnotes and hyperlink them. There are probably other ways to accomplish this, I just found this the easiest.

Making endnotes*:

Create a paragraph style called “endnotes”
Place cursor where you want the endnote number to go in your text
Repeat for other endnotes

* for a more detail guide, visit the following website .

On generating a figure list:

The figure list will inexplicably get pretty long and tedious to update. Using cross-reference and paragraph styles, you could generate a list that updates according to the figure description. This set up will also allow figure numbers to rearrange accordingly when you need to insert a new figure in-between two existing ones.

Making the figures:

Create a paragraph style called “Figures”
In “Number” type in ‘Figure’ in the field and edit the variables to your preference, you can use “Character Styles” to modify the appearance of the figure number
Apply the paragraph style to text boxes that hold the descriptions and the figure numbers will appear in order
There may be a better way to create this list, I still had to manually insert each cross reference but it saved the time of having to type each number and description out individually.
I would still recommend doing this step closer to the end of the thesis as sometimes the update gets confused when the figure has shifted around a lot or removed.

*This step is important for the figure number to continue counting even when you create separate text frames, for a more detailed explanation visit this website.

Note: if you have set up a book, the file holding the figure list would lag due to the cross references to other files, the solution is to simply have all the files open when you working on the figure list so the computer isn’t trying to open each of the files in the background to check if the references are updated.

Lastly, if you export your pdf with hyperlinks enabled, readers of the digital copy can use the hyperlinks to jump to chapters, endnotes and even figures depending on what links you’ve set up.

I learned most of these tips through Youtube and Indesignsecrets.com , there are lots of good tips to be found. Hopefully this article is a nice comprehensive guide for starting to layout your thesis. Happy thesis writing!

About Vikkie Chen

Vikkie is a graduate student at the Waterloo School of Architecture researching the practice of curation and architectural exhibitions as a method of development for the field of architecture.

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