Printing Dissertations

Ok... maybe my last post!

When you print your dissertation, go to the on-campus branch of Kinko's. There's a guy there who's really cool and happy and who's been there since 1999 when the place was called Dissertation Station. He joked that mine was probably the 14,000th dissertation that he's printed!

I printed the B&W pages of my thesis on our laser printer, and then went to Kinko's to have the color pages printed. But what would have been easier would be to have all of the pages printed at Kinko's. If you tell them which pages are to be in color and which B&W, they'll charge you the color rate for only the pages that are in color. Also our printer has trouble printing on thesis paper and sometimes jams.

I ordered the Stanford thesis paper with the Stanford monogram. But when I made some test copies, I discovered that the paper is a bit transparent and when it's printed on both sides, the print on the opposite side shows through a little bit. This made me decide to print single-sided instead. If having two-sided prints is important to you, you might want to consider getting different paper.

Good luck with your dissertations!

How to keep page headers from being all-caps

When writing your thesis, sometimes you don't want your page headers to be in the default all-caps. This is especially important if your chapter or section titles contain chemical formulas that would look really ugly if converted to all-caps. This is a conundrum that K.Yun has been idly pondering for some time now.

I've found a solution that uses the package "fancyhdr" which is available here. The documentation is here. "fancyhdr" lets you format your headers in all sorts of way: italic, bold, not-all-caps -- it even let's your draw a horizontal rule below your header.

Here is what you can input to get rid of the all-caps but otherwise keep everything the same:

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\fancypagestyle{headings}{%
\fancyhead{}
\fancyhead[ER]{\nouppercase{ \slshape \leftmark}}
\fancyhead[OL]{\nouppercase{ \slshape \rightmark}}
\fancyhead[EL,OR]{\thepage}
\fancyfoot{}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
}

All of the above goes before the \begin{document} in your latex file.

But why keep everything the same if "fancyhdr" let's you format your header in an infinite number of ways?