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kareinaOver the course of the past I-don't-feel-like-looking-up-how-many weeks I've been re-working chapter two of my thesis there have been substantial changes. New calculations have given me results where I used to have sections explaining the way in which I'd failed to obtain results. The organizational system has been completely revamped, with any number of paragraphs having moved to completely different places. Needless to say, this all has had some serious repercussions to my list of figures. It is fairly common when preparing a science manuscript to have a list of all of the figures, including their full captions, at the bottom of the document. Since I can't be bothered changing the figure numbers manually, I used Word's "caption" feature to assign numbers to each of those captions, and then in the body of the text use the "reference" function to stick in pointers which grabs the current number from the correct figure. This works beautifully, with the numbers always matching. However, in the course of moving paragraphs around I ignored the list of figures. This meant that reading from the top of the chapter I first referred to figures 1, 2, and three, followed by 45, 95, and 72 before mentioning figure 4. Clearly, this will not do--it looks much better (and, strangely enough, is an UTAS requirement) if the first mention of each figure results in a sequential list. Therefore I spent four hours today cleaning up my figure list.
Step one: copy the figure list into a new document, put it on the second monitor.
Step two: read from the top of the chapter, when you get to a figure reference if it happens to be the first one on the list on the other monitor, highlight it to show that it has been counted, read on, highlighting figure captions on the other monitor as they are referenced in the text.
Step three: The first time you reach a reference to a figure which is *not* the next one on the list, go to the actual list of figures in the thesis, cut that figure caption from where it is, paste it to where it should be, and tell it to update the field codes so that all of the numbers are changed to match their new sequence.
Step four: copy the revised list of figures from the thesis from the caption which was just moved and renumbered (which, of course, also changed the numbers of everything below it on the list), and paste it in place of the portion of the list on the second monitor below the last highlighted caption.
Step five: highlight the one which was just moved in the list as it is now sequential,
repeat the process from step two, starting from the figure number which was just highlighted.
In the course of this process I found a total of seven figure captions which no longer belong in the thesis due to the new calculations I'd done providing better results than the ones shown in those versions. I also found eight places where I should have included a figure, but haven't yet. Those eight have all had bright pink notes inserted to remind me to do the figures soon.
I think I expected this process to take an hour or two, but it turned out to be rather complicated, particularly for those samples where I'd done a number of different sorts of calculations with different starting assumptions. Making certain that each "see figure 10" note actually pointed to what I thought it did took a bit of thought for those samples.
During breaks from this amazingly tedious and surprisingly demanding process I managed to get the loo cleaned, a load of laundry done, a loaf of bread baked (yum!), and a walk to the local waterfall. Next up: check the list of table references...
Step one: copy the figure list into a new document, put it on the second monitor.
Step two: read from the top of the chapter, when you get to a figure reference if it happens to be the first one on the list on the other monitor, highlight it to show that it has been counted, read on, highlighting figure captions on the other monitor as they are referenced in the text.
Step three: The first time you reach a reference to a figure which is *not* the next one on the list, go to the actual list of figures in the thesis, cut that figure caption from where it is, paste it to where it should be, and tell it to update the field codes so that all of the numbers are changed to match their new sequence.
Step four: copy the revised list of figures from the thesis from the caption which was just moved and renumbered (which, of course, also changed the numbers of everything below it on the list), and paste it in place of the portion of the list on the second monitor below the last highlighted caption.
Step five: highlight the one which was just moved in the list as it is now sequential,
repeat the process from step two, starting from the figure number which was just highlighted.
In the course of this process I found a total of seven figure captions which no longer belong in the thesis due to the new calculations I'd done providing better results than the ones shown in those versions. I also found eight places where I should have included a figure, but haven't yet. Those eight have all had bright pink notes inserted to remind me to do the figures soon.
I think I expected this process to take an hour or two, but it turned out to be rather complicated, particularly for those samples where I'd done a number of different sorts of calculations with different starting assumptions. Making certain that each "see figure 10" note actually pointed to what I thought it did took a bit of thought for those samples.
During breaks from this amazingly tedious and surprisingly demanding process I managed to get the loo cleaned, a load of laundry done, a loaf of bread baked (yum!), and a walk to the local waterfall. Next up: check the list of table references...
