This is the sound of breaking up

Time for another update on the state of my thesis. Over the last week, I've read through the whole thing (in print form) and scribbled down what final-ish changes needed to be made in the margins. Then I set about actually making those changes on the computer. As I dealt with each one, I highlighted it on the printout. Then I went through the edited version on the computer screen and made sure that each one of the highlighted items (I didn't bother to count them all, but there must be a couple of hundred of them) had been dealt with correctly. I really needed to do this, because up until now, I had been reading chapters individually, with no proper idea of the entire product. The "Find" feature in WinEdt has really been getting a workout!

This morning, I have gone through and made sure that there are no mathematical expressions that have been split in unfortunate places over two lines of text...fortunately, there were only a couple of these to deal with. This really leaves only one task for me to do before sending the whole thing off for my supervisor to read - deal with the bad page breaks! LaTeX might be all fancy when dealing with where to take a new page, using guidelines on how much of a page can be taken up by figures, etc., but there are still some cases where it produces less-than-desirable results. This is possibly more evident in my case, as I have a lot of 'bulky' equations which are likely to not fit where you want them to go. The result is a lot of chunks of white space. So, this afternoon I'll be using \vspace a lot to try to make things look more presentable. This is an important quality for a thesis, since the last criterion on the Examiners' Recommendation Form is "The quality of English and general presentation are of a standard for publication". You don't often see big spaces in a journal, and nor should you see them in a thesis.