Define double spacing
I just spent far too long with someone at the graduate office trying to get a concrete understanding of how they define double spacing. I tried my best to explain that I cannot just put an extra »line« between each line of my document.
All information I have been able to obtain elsewhere seems to indicate that what they really want, but do not seem to know it, is one and a one-half line spacing. That is in LaTeX you would set \baselinestretch to 1.5. I am almost certain that this is what I should be doing, but the woman seemed to think that I wanted there to be twice as much space between baselines.
I tried to take the approach of getting concrete and asking that if I used a 10pt font, what should the measurement be between the bottom of one line and the next. However, to my surprise the woman I spoke with claimed that they do not actually measure this, they just look at it and »know«.
So we agreed that I would just fax her a sample and she would let me know whether it looked correct.
Surprisingly, the definition of double spacing is something that the Chicago Manual of Style does not address.
Chung-chieh Shan said,
November 9, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
I had the same experience at Harvard: the definition of double spacing is operationalized by a lady who works in the library system. She was willing to receive PDFs by email, not just samples by fax, though.
Set Implicit Arguments said,
November 10, 2007 @ 3:54 pm
Can’t you just look at somebody else’s dissertation and go off of that?
washburn said,
November 12, 2007 @ 4:21 pm
She was willing to receive PDFs by email, not just samples by fax, though.
I imagine that may actually be an option, but at the time I did not think to press the issue. I am not really sure why people still want to use faxes anymore; I am hard pressed to believe there is someone that has a fax machine that does not have an e-mail address.
washburn said,
November 12, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
Can’t you just look at somebody else’s dissertation and go off of that?
Yes and no. I did actually look at one dissertation by a former student in my department and they appeared to be using a
\baselinestretchof 2, but the template the department distributes (but makes no guarantees of its correctness) uses 1.5, and another student in my department that recently graduated said he used 1.5.So I am starting to suspect that as long as it is not single spaced, they will interpret the document as being double spaced.
Joshua Dunfield said,
November 14, 2007 @ 12:27 am
“I am not really sure why people still want to use faxes anymore; I am hard pressed to believe there is someone that has a fax machine that does not have an e-mail address.”
A lot of people think that faxed signatures are legally valid and scanned signatures aren’t*, which obviously isn’t the issue here, but does explain why people sometimes want stuff faxed. And there’s always bureaucratic inertia.
* What’s especially funny is that there are a number of subscription-fee-based e-mail/fax gateways that will happily turn your “non-legal” scan into a “legal” fax (and vice versa)…
washburn said,
November 15, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
A lot of people think that faxed signatures are legally valid and scanned signatures aren’t*, which obviously isn’t the issue here, but does explain why people sometimes want stuff faxed. And there’s always bureaucratic inertia.
And I suppose fax machines are slightly less scary to the technically disinclined. If you can work a phone and work a copier, you can probably handle a fax machine. Though, it seems like it would be a great idea to have networked fax machines then.
Of course, that would lead to vast abouts of faxed spam. Which would seem like it should already be a problem with long distance being cheap as it is, but I expect the issue is that the existing laws deal much more harshly/effectively with fax spam than e-mail spam. I suppose it also harder for your spam botnet to go undetected if you try using the system’s fax/modem.
∃xistential Type » Absolutely done said,
November 23, 2007 @ 11:17 pm
[...] far as double spacing goes, I went with a baselinestretch of 1.5 as one of my colleagues said that he did so and it [...]
bob said,
February 4, 2008 @ 6:10 pm
spacing twice
washburn said,
February 4, 2008 @ 6:53 pm
@bob: Nope. Empirical evidence shows that they accept one and half spacing as double spacing.