Word to your matriculation!
February 7, 2006 11:41 AM Subscribe
Help me format the figures in my dissertation with Word.
I have several full-page images with figure captions below in my dissertation. Ideally I would like to have the image occupy the first full page after the paragraph I mention them. However, if I insert the image inline, I get a stub of a page. The paragraph before the image usually concludes around the middle of a page and then there is a bunch of white space followed by the page with the image.
Is there an easy way to make a page with an image float? That is, occupy a whole page somewhere with full pages of text before and after? The alternative is to hand format everything. I can’t be the first person to encounter this and I would love to hear some advice.
I have several full-page images with figure captions below in my dissertation. Ideally I would like to have the image occupy the first full page after the paragraph I mention them. However, if I insert the image inline, I get a stub of a page. The paragraph before the image usually concludes around the middle of a page and then there is a bunch of white space followed by the page with the image.
Is there an easy way to make a page with an image float? That is, occupy a whole page somewhere with full pages of text before and after? The alternative is to hand format everything. I can’t be the first person to encounter this and I would love to hear some advice.
This is a major pain in the ass.
First question: You are using Word's automatic figure legend utility, right? Because if you are not, you need to learn how to use this feature and Outline View to automatically generate your TOC. Make sure your chapter titles are linked to outline level styles.
Second question: Are you inserting page breaks like a crazy person? Knowing the difference between page and section breaks, continuous or non-continuous and so on will help you immensely. To save you some major hassles, make a new doc template and edit your heading styles, saving them to the template. DO NOT do this in your normal.dot unless you want to have every Heading 1 from here to eternity act as a chapter header. Base your thesis on this template. Take your chapter header style (linked to H1 and outlined with chapter number automatically, if you desire) and modify the paragraph style to always insert a page break before. This alone is a timesaver, and ensures that your chapters (1) will always remain sequentially numbered, (2) will show up in the auto-generated TOC, and (3) always have a full break before.
Back to your original question: the figures. Using Word to insert the captions (Insert --> Reference --> Caption and choose "Figure" from the caption type list) ensures the captions are auto-numbered and show up in the TOC. Forget about this while writing, and just keep all fig captions in a separate file until you are done. At the end, when you're ready to print the final formatted version, here's what you do:
Use "Print Layout" mode to see how it will look when formatted. Find the best spot to plug in your images, and at the end of that page insert a next page section break. Add a second next page section break after that. Within that space, insert your figure and your auto-caption. Don't place the fig in a floating box unless you have to. Me, I left this page blank, and went through replacing this blank page with a color figure and legend. You need the legend in your blank page even if you are replacing them manually after printing, otherwise Word won't index them properly.
The trick with the section breaks is that you can format that one section differently - different margins for facing pages, for example, or even rotate page direction, without affecting the flow of your other pages. (When rotating pages, fixing the page number orientation is a major pain in the ass*, so avoid it if possible.) Section breaks in the middle of a justified paragraph won't even change the justification. You will have to make some changes to the header and footer - you can unlink header/footer from the previous section if necessary, which is important especially when numbering pages, as the first few cover pages are not supposed to be numbered.
If you need a facing page for a full-page image caption, DO NOT forget to mirror-image the margins for the facign page. I had to re-print a few sections because of this. Also, remember to add a page break after the caption to allow room for the image, or you'll be one page short when adding the figure.
*If you do need to rotate pages: In that section, view footer, select page number, grab the box that the number is hiding in, and drag it to the desired location on the side of the page. Then change text direction. This one took me a while to get correct, but it is possible to do it.
If you get stuck, my email is in my profile - I'll bounce you a copy of my thesis template. I recommend looking at it but not necessarily using it as there will undoubtedly be some old styles and other cruft that I like but will annoy you. I can send you some example pages if you need to look at what I did to figure anything out.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:25 PM on February 7, 2006
First question: You are using Word's automatic figure legend utility, right? Because if you are not, you need to learn how to use this feature and Outline View to automatically generate your TOC. Make sure your chapter titles are linked to outline level styles.
Second question: Are you inserting page breaks like a crazy person? Knowing the difference between page and section breaks, continuous or non-continuous and so on will help you immensely. To save you some major hassles, make a new doc template and edit your heading styles, saving them to the template. DO NOT do this in your normal.dot unless you want to have every Heading 1 from here to eternity act as a chapter header. Base your thesis on this template. Take your chapter header style (linked to H1 and outlined with chapter number automatically, if you desire) and modify the paragraph style to always insert a page break before. This alone is a timesaver, and ensures that your chapters (1) will always remain sequentially numbered, (2) will show up in the auto-generated TOC, and (3) always have a full break before.
Back to your original question: the figures. Using Word to insert the captions (Insert --> Reference --> Caption and choose "Figure" from the caption type list) ensures the captions are auto-numbered and show up in the TOC. Forget about this while writing, and just keep all fig captions in a separate file until you are done. At the end, when you're ready to print the final formatted version, here's what you do:
Use "Print Layout" mode to see how it will look when formatted. Find the best spot to plug in your images, and at the end of that page insert a next page section break. Add a second next page section break after that. Within that space, insert your figure and your auto-caption. Don't place the fig in a floating box unless you have to. Me, I left this page blank, and went through replacing this blank page with a color figure and legend. You need the legend in your blank page even if you are replacing them manually after printing, otherwise Word won't index them properly.
The trick with the section breaks is that you can format that one section differently - different margins for facing pages, for example, or even rotate page direction, without affecting the flow of your other pages. (When rotating pages, fixing the page number orientation is a major pain in the ass*, so avoid it if possible.) Section breaks in the middle of a justified paragraph won't even change the justification. You will have to make some changes to the header and footer - you can unlink header/footer from the previous section if necessary, which is important especially when numbering pages, as the first few cover pages are not supposed to be numbered.
If you need a facing page for a full-page image caption, DO NOT forget to mirror-image the margins for the facign page. I had to re-print a few sections because of this. Also, remember to add a page break after the caption to allow room for the image, or you'll be one page short when adding the figure.
*If you do need to rotate pages: In that section, view footer, select page number, grab the box that the number is hiding in, and drag it to the desired location on the side of the page. Then change text direction. This one took me a while to get correct, but it is possible to do it.
If you get stuck, my email is in my profile - I'll bounce you a copy of my thesis template. I recommend looking at it but not necessarily using it as there will undoubtedly be some old styles and other cruft that I like but will annoy you. I can send you some example pages if you need to look at what I did to figure anything out.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:25 PM on February 7, 2006
You could place the image and captions in a table as well. Place the image in one cell and the caption, etc in another.
posted by JJ86 at 12:40 PM on February 7, 2006
posted by JJ86 at 12:40 PM on February 7, 2006
Have you asked your advisor about this? Because in publishing, it's standard to place all captions on the last page of the text, with figures following. Anyone who has authored and peer-reviewed academic text is accustomed to seeing manuscripts formatted exactly this way. For a dissertation-length manuscript, this might not fly, but it couldn't hurt to ask. Barring that, caution live frogs gives some really great advice.
Just to save some future trouble: if your dissertation is actually published you will have to strip all the captions from the figures and remove the figures from the text, so make sure to save a version like the one I'm describing so you don't have to do yet more work on this later.
posted by melissa may at 7:24 PM on February 7, 2006
Just to save some future trouble: if your dissertation is actually published you will have to strip all the captions from the figures and remove the figures from the text, so make sure to save a version like the one I'm describing so you don't have to do yet more work on this later.
posted by melissa may at 7:24 PM on February 7, 2006
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by nekton at 12:03 PM on February 7, 2006