On 31 Mar 2010 at 8:43, Christopher Smith wrote: > > On Tue Mar 30, at TuesdayMar 30 11:05 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > On 30 Mar 2010 at 21:57, Christopher Smith wrote: > > > >> On Tue Mar 30, at TuesdayMar 30 9:49 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > >> > >>> Last I checked, UMI PDFs of dissertations were graphics of scans of > >>> the printed page, not produced from the text of the document. > >>> Even if > >>> they *were* produced from the printed document, specifying dpi of > >>> source graphics is not something any institution would be doing, any > >>> more than they would be restricting Ph.D. candidates to using MS > >>> Word > >>> to produce their dissertations. > >> > >> My wife's Master's thesis, completed last year, REQUIRED her to > >> submit a copy on MS Word. > > > > To whom? UMI or the university? My bet is that's a local requirement > > (and reprehensible). > > Yes, it was the university that set that requirement. I did find that > they had quite a stick up their collective posterior about tiny details.
Well, academia is largely about tiny details. You know the old saying about why disputes in academia are so noxious (because the stakes are so low). > >> The reasoning is that a searchable archive > >> copy will be created (I imagine in PDF) from her file. I think scans > >> of printed pages are for old documents that don't exist in electronic > >> form, but they still type in the abstract for the search engines. > > > > There are quite recent dissertations that UMI delivers as PDFs of > > scans that could have been delivered as electronic text instead. > > She had a lot of tables and graphs with closely-specified > requirements (which I am sure was the university!) but I don't know > anything more than that, except that she used the built-in tables and > graphs in Microsoft Office to accomplish them. I'm not sure how they > would show up in electronic text (do you include PDF as an example of > "electronic text?" I'm not sure of the definition), nor what the > requirements were. Probably the clerk at the university who creates > the PDF knows. PDF is certainly electronic text! And the only reason to justify sending the original format is so that it's editable by the recipients, and I really don't think that's the intention. Indeed, that would seem to me to amount to a potential problem, since you could accuse someone of having altered the thesis after it was filed electronically if it's in Word. If I were required to submit in Word, I'd definitely embed the fonts in the document, which makes it read- only. Indeed, it's quite impossible for Word to be a reliable electronic submission format if the fonts are *not* embedded, since you can't know if the recipient has the appropriate fonts installed. Sure, most institutions prohibit the use of exotic base fonts, but many subject areas are going to *require* subject-specific fonts (Music, for instance, or Russian, or Arabic, or Linguistics, or Mathematics or any number of disciplines). PDF is really the only valid electronic submission format (though I guess MS's competitor to PDF, the name of which I forget, might work, too). > >> She also had to submit three paper copies, with everything specified > >> from the typeface to the weight and finish of the paper. It was quite > >> an ordeal. > > > > But still no requirements on dpi for embedded graphics. > > > > Certainly we're getting closer to having your tools specified, but > > still not something as specific as resolution of embedded content. > > No, sorry I have no information on resolution of embedded content. > If the university was consistent, it would have specified a lossless > format, rather than a bit-mapped image. In a Word document, the original file format that was inserted is completely irrelevant, because Word uses its own meta-format wrapper around the original image that makes it resizable and editable. So, again, it's just completely irrelevant in any logical sense what your source graphic's format/resolution is, so long as it's legible on the printed page. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
