Re: Critique my thesis typesetting?

dkjk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Oct 29, 10:27 am, Chris <none@all> wrote:
I won't dwell on points others have made, except for the headings issue.
It's true that the defaults are quite heavy, particularly with Times, which
has quite a chunky bold face. In your case, there is also an unfortunate
line break at section 6. By all means drop the font sizes and/or weights a
little to help with these. However, headings are supposed to mark clear
divisions in the document and to help the reader to scan, so you want them
to stand out and have a clear visual hierarchy. I strongly disagree with
the suggestion to use things like small caps and italics for headings,
because in any decent font both of these are explicitly designed to blend
in with body text. Another poster charitably referred to such a style as
"classic"; I would suggest "obsolete", "failed" or "shunned"! :-)

Intersting. What would you suggest for section/subsection/
subsubsection?

First choose a font for your headings: either use your body font, or pick something like a contrasting sans serif. I wouldn't recommend using another serif font that is similar to but not the same as your body font, as that tends to look awkward.

Normally, I use bold for headings to make them stand out, but if the font you've chosen has a heavier look than your body font already then you might just use the regular weight. It's the distinction to a reader scanning the page that counts, not the use of bold per se. Some fonts have a range of weights and something like a semibold works better at larger sizes, but I don't think this is true of any version of Times I've come across.

For your lowest level (subsubsection), I'd start by trying the same font size as your body text. For subsections you can increase the size a little, and for sections a little more. If you're doing this, you want each level of heading to look more important than the one below it, so there is a visual hierarchy if you have two adjacent headings of different levels and again to help someone scanning through your paper. Make sure the sizes are different enough to allow this, but for a paper like this I wouldn't want too big a font in the main text; save the huge sizes for things like titles/subtitles or the chapter headings in a book, where you aren't interfering with the flow of the main text. Something like 11pt, 13pt and 16pt works reasonably well if you've got 11pt body text.

To create a clear visual separation and associate the headings with the following text, add plenty of whitespace above a heading (more space for the more significant headings) and relatively little below. Personally, I don't add any extra space below the lowest level headings (subsubsection), and perhaps an extra line's space above. By the time I'm up at section headings, I've probably got a good half-inch or more of spacing above, and a few points below; to guide the latter, start by thinking about the sort of line spacing you would want if you set several lines of text in that font size. Make sure the spacing works with each level of heading followed by either body text or a heading of the next level down.

As another possible style, if you prefer to avoid the larger fonts, you can keep all your headings the same size, probably matching the body text, rely on making them all a heavier weight to get them to stand out, and use more whitespace above the stronger headings to give some visual hierarchy. Personally, I find this understated, particularly in TeX world where vertical spacing tends to be somewhat liquid already, but your mileage may vary.

So basically, the first three things to play with are the font and weight, and the whitespace around the headings. These are usually sufficient to create clear separations between sections and easy scanning, without resorting to things like italics (or, worse, slanted text, which should have died with underlining) and capitals or small capitals, all of which are harder to read than regular text and less visually distinctive anyway.

Of course, these are only rules of thumb, and you should certainly adjust them to taste.

Some manual adjustment of your maths spacing would help. In particular,
look at superscripts and subscripts, radicals, and fractions (both
\frac{a}{b} and a/b varieties) in the maths. Of course, this can be rather
time-consuming, but I would at least try to fix the clashes where symbols
touch, as these can go beyond mere aesthetics and into damaging legibility.

I think the equations look okay? Which ones are you referring to in
particular?

A few cases I noticed:
- subscripts on \varphi\ped{b}, \phi\ped{L}, \phi\ped{R}, ...
- superscripts on \gamma, M, Z, \nu, \widetilde(y), ...
- f-issues: f_0', f_{i}^{\mu\nu}, ...
- \bar{\Psi} (bar off-centre and too high, e.g., caption for figure 2)
- [0,\sqrt{V_0}] (root symbol collides with ])

The \overline{\Psi} you used in one place works much better than \bar; I assume these are intended to represent the same thing.

You might consider the slightly larger variants of () and / in various places that have taller but single-line content as well.

One final nitpick: the shorthands for "for example" and "that is" are correctly written "e.g.," and "i.e.,", with bonus points for using a thin space after the first dot. Neither "eg" nor "ie" is a word in English, so writing "eg," or "ie," is technically wrong. Since you're obviously trying to make your document beautiful, you might like to fix these.

Hope that helps,
Chris
.

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