Document Structure
- Introduction
- Theory
- Document Structure
- Chapter Headings
- Chapter Numbering
- Table of Contents
- Outline
- Navigator
- Text Body
- Paragraph styles overview
- Reusing styles
- Default Page Formatting
- Title Page
- Papers without a Title Page
- Pages with and without numbering
- Roman Page Numbering
- Group Work
- Proofreading
- Numbered lists and bullets
- Line numbering
- Cross-references
- Footnotes
- Bibliography
- Quotes
- Tables
- Charts
- Pictures
- Snapshots
- Presentations & Graphics
- Cross tables (Statistics)
- Extra Long Web Adresses
- Fonts
- Emphasis
- Special Characters
- Non separable combinations
- Shortcut keys
- Mouse clicks
- PDFs
- Saving your files
- Several files open at once
- Search and replace
- Spell Check
- Synonyms
- Document Infos
- Labels and Form letters
- Help
- Installing Program
- Microsoft Word
- Practice I
- Practice II
When conceiving an essay or thesis you will invariably have in your mind’s eye not only its contents but also its overall structure.
The contents consist in the main of the actual text. It is the Text Body which makes up the bulk of the document. The Text Body has its own formatting style, appropriately called just that: “Text Body”. But we will go into that in more detail in section 12.
For now we want to deal with the structure of a document. The main means to make the underlying structure optically visible for the reader is of course the use of chapter and section headings. Your text will surely have an implicit structure independently of any headings anyway, but it’s the headings which make it explicit.
There are of course first and foremost the main chapter headings, that is Level 1. Then you might want section headings, that would be Level 2 and subsection headings, Level 3, and so on, right down to a theoretical Level 10.
These various Levels are optically distinguishable one from the other by:
- font size (measured in points, abbreviated as “pt”)
- typeface (regular/bold/italic)
- font (e.g. Times/Arial/Garamond/Futura etc.)
- spacing above paragraph
- spacing below paragraph
- numbering (optional)
- breaks (e.g. main chapter headings might all begin on a new page)
It’s best to type in all the headings and sub-headings right from the start and activate their automatic numbering too. So you have a structure which you can then fill in little by little with text.
Once you have the headings you can then automatically generate a table of contents.
Note also that the decision what is a heading and what it should look like are two separate decisions.
