Hi,

I recently submitted my PhD thesis (chemistry), and am now waiting around for a viva - date to be finalised but in 3 months or so. I'm also now writing up a paper from my thesis, meaning I annoyingly have to re-open my thesis chapters that I'd really rather never see again just to copy images across to the paper and so on.

During this, to my horror, I found a pretty significant formatting error in my final chapter (6) - basically, all my text got pushed a line down when I did a final seemingly insignificant change to a figure, meaning that from about halfway through the chapter onwards, the figure captions have been pushed onto the page after the figure itself. I've no idea how I didn't notice this, but I didn't, and the (one-sided) printed thesis will have this error. It affects about 7 figures.

Obviously I'm massively annoyed and kind of worried about how examiners will react to this, as it's pretty sloppy - I was somewhat rushed during printing and was more checking that the pages were in order etc. Has anyone ever done something similarly stupid and if so (how) did it work out? All the other chapters, which are the first 300 pages or so, are fine. I'm more concerned that the figures might not make much sense if they fail to realise this error...the figure numbers referred to in the text end up on the wrong page.

Any advice / similar experiences appreciated!

Matt

I don't think it's a huge problem. You could explain what happened in the viva if the examiners question it, and it could be easily fixed as part of minor corrections.

This isn't a problem at all. They will just tell you to fix it before printing the final version.

As the others have said, it's not really a problem. I didn't notice that one table changed from landscape to portrait in my thesis which made it really small and almost impossible to read! I just fixed it along with the other corrections.

Thanks all (only just seen this since my email neglected to alert me to replies, my bad!). This is what I'd hoped, to be fair 2 months further on from submission it seems rather less important...