[fosap]

I get a teaching degree. Every discipline as it's own formating requirements. For CS and Physics things have to look good, but there is not too much specified. Everybody uses TeX, length is measured in characters, not pages, usually there is no minimum length, but a maximum length.

For pedagogics there are huge (like 30 pages) formating requirements. The formating requirements itself are incredible ugly and often quite objectively bad. Such as lots of widows and orphans (even in tables!). The document is distributed as a .doc file, and yes it does look like this even in Word, it's not a fault of LibreOffice. Length is measured in pages and the critical limit is the minimum length.

On the subjective side they IMO made the worst possible choices. Arial (or similar), 12 points, almost no margins, 150% spacing between the lines, italic and bold headings.

It looks very bad, is MS Word centric, but they have the nerve to make a style guide longer than a page.

Also, looking at psychology papers, it seems to me that non technical fields have a thing for shitty typography.

[girvo]

> On the subjective side they IMO made the worst possible choices. Arial (or similar), 12 points, almost no margins, 150% spacing between the lines, italic and bold headings.

So that's why my high-school's formatting requirements for assignments and papers were exactly what you've listed there.

[analog31]

I have to laugh when my kids are assigned a "five page" paper, that will never be printed.