End of My Tether

I’m starting to become intensely frustrated with the process of turning the thesis into a university-specific PDF for submission.

It shouldn’t be so difficult.

Or, if it really needs to be so difficult, it shouldn’t be in the hands of the harassed postgraduate student whose thesis it is.

I’m entirely in favour of the electronic submission of the thesis; I think, in the long run, it will only help promulgate postgraduate research, once people aren’t committing to either travelling to the library in which the hard copy is held or paying a fortune to have the thesis copied onto microfilm.

But the process itself is showing more potholes than anticipated.

We started out this afternoon with a checklist of things to do.

Item 1: Set up an account at the printery, so I could download the PDF-conversion software. Easy. Slight problem in the fact that they didn’t tell me my password had to be limited to a certain form until after they’d rejected my first choice—which always annoys me slightly—but that’s a minor pothole in the road.

So I ticked that one off the list.

Item 2: Download and instal the software. Should be easy—until I get a message telling me that an error had prevented installation.

So I can’t even instal the necessary software.

Neither can Nick.

And we’re stuck on Item 2. It’s a public holiday, so I can’t even contact the printery—I did send them an e-mail, but I’m teaching tomorrow, so that’s another delay.

Oh, well—what can you do? Except deal with the other items on the checklist.

Because the really fun thing, the thing I didn’t realise at first, is that all images in the thesis have to be in TIFF format.

Mine are JPEG—but JPEG is unacceptable for the conversion process.

So that’s the sixteen images in the thesis itself that need to be deleted and replaced with TIFF versions.

(Of course, the images are on Nick’s computer, because he has the fancy editing tools, and so far he hasn’t been able to locate them all. I suggested they should all be in a folder labelled “Images for Treena’s PhD: VERY VERY IMPORTANT,” but apparently they’re, and I quote, “all over the place.”)

But, even more fun—if you have a particularly loose definition of “fun”—is Appendix A. Appendix A is over fifty pages long, and it’s all images. All in JPEG format.

Appendix A was built once in Word. But when I showed the final draft to my supervisors, they felt that some of the images—the photographs of holograph material—were too small to be legible, and had to be blown up.

So I re-built it, again in Word. But I failed to back it up before my computer exploded in February (I’d only finished it the day before) and it was lost in its entirety.

So we re-built it, in Pages this time, because I was desperately short of time, and Nick thought Pages was more efficient. That version got me through submission.

Then I copied it into Word again, so I could—theoretically, it seems now—turn it into a PDF for submission. And Word randomly changed font sizes and even fonts themselves in all the captions, so I had to go through and re-format all of those.

Now, it has to be re-built once again, just to turn those fifty-odd images into TIFF format.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m at the end of my tether. The corrections to the thesis themselves only took a couple of days, but this conversion process has been dragging on for weeks. In fact, I’m getting perilously close to the two-month deadline for submitting the corrected manuscript.

Surely the struggle with a Ph.D. should be in producing the thesis itself, and not in this process. I realise we’re the guinea pigs, with all that that entails.

But I think I used up all my energy to get this thesis submitted in the first place. I’m not sure how much I have left to deal with a document-conversion process that’s well outside my area of expertise, even if it weren’t constantly hitting potholes.