[gus_massa]

For sending official paperwork to a judge or a visa or something like that, there are a lot of rules. Sending A4 instead of Letter will make them reject your paperwork on the spot.

Someone told me a horror story about a PhD thesis rejected because it has wrong margins (probably something about the margins of the document and additional margins added by the driver). He has to reprint all the copies. Most universities are not so stupid, but if your university is stupid enough, remember to triple check the margins.

[dhosek]

In the 80s at UIC, there was famously a woman in the graduate school who checked measurements of all margins and other spacing with a ruler and rejected dissertations which didn’t meet the strict requirements.

[mbreese]

In the early 2000s there was a person at Indiana U who also did this. You had to get any dissertation approved by her before printing. And there was a ruler. Are PDFs accepted for dissertations yet?

[MengerSponge]

Dissertations go through the library's Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) service these days. Margins still matter, as do tons and tons of fiddly bullshit.

My personal ETD "hilarity": there is/was a bug in Adobe Acrobat that caused the font I set my dissertation in to glitch/look jagged at exactly 100% zoom. If you shifted to 99.7% or 100.1%? It re-rendered and looked perfect. Only on Acrobat. Not in Chrome or Firefox or Preview or Foxit or anything else. I had to change the font for ETD to accept my document.

Changing the font doesn't sound like a big deal, and in principle it's easy to do, but it means none of the figures match the main text. The line breaks are now totally different, so those typeset line-endings and paragraphs that were rephrased to avoid awkward hyphenations? All gone.

For that and a few other more important reasons, I have two versions of my dissertation. There's the one hosted by ETD, and the one that I actually share and use professionally.

[dhosek]

For my MFA, my cohort was the first (and, it turned out last) to submit electronic copies of their theses. I doubt anyone was checking margins on that, although I made a point of making sure I hit all the formatting requirements. Of course, because I (and I think everyone from my cohort) requested an embargo of our theses expecting that someday we’d get NY publishing deals for our work. it effectively means that nobody will ever read them, unlike the cohorts who submitted printed theses which are shelved in the library so someone could go to the library and read them (at least in theory). Our program director mentioned something about some significant writer’s thesis in the University of Iowa library which has a note written inside the printed copy saying, “if you’re reading this, I guess I’m famous now.”

[londons_explore]

> Sending A4 instead of Letter will make them reject your paperwork on the spot.

This generally happens not because anyone actually cares about the paper size, but because some employee has a target to 'process 5 applications per day, and then you can go home.' If an application is made on the wrong size paper, thats an insta-deny, and the employee just saved themselves an hour!

[gus_massa]

It's more about making nice folders where all the sheets hace the same size, and be able to make holes in the same spot in all of them. The employee has to be there 8 hours per day, even if there in no application to process.