Thesis formatting checklist

First, find your own rulebook

For every check on this page, the first thing to find out is what your university has written. Seniors and the print shop near the campus gate will give their own ideas, and both can be wrong. Go only by what the university has given in writing.

Mostly the format rules are kept in one of three places. Some universities add an annexure at the back of the PhD regulations. Some give a separate file called “guidelines for thesis preparation”, and others send a circular from the research office. A few universities have all three, and many times the three documents don’t match with each other. Anna University, for example, has a format manual inside its R2025 regulations and a separate 2022 circular about how the pages are counted.

Download the latest file from the official website and write down the date of that file. When two documents say different things, take the newer one to your guide and ask which one the office actually follows. Note the answer with the date.

In some universities very little is fixed. The University of Madras gives the spacing, the font size and the binding, and leaves the remaining style to your supervisor and the Research Advisory Committee. If your university is like this, decide the other points with your guide early and follow them in every chapter.

What we found as of October 2026 is given in our university guides for Anna University, University of Madras, Bharathiar University, VTU, Bangalore University, Osmania University and JNTUH.

Paper, margins and the binding edge

Do the page setup first, before you paste even one chapter into the file. In Word it is under Layout › Margins › Custom Margins. Enter the four margin values from your rulebook and apply them to the whole document.

Universities ask for a wider left margin since that edge gets stitched into the binding and some paper is lost there. When you print on both sides, the bound edge comes on the left for one page and on the right for the next page. For that case Word’s “Mirror margins” option, which gives an inside and an outside margin, may work better. Ask the print shop how they bind before choosing.

Next, scroll the whole file and find whatever is spilling past the margins. Mostly it is wide tables, big figures, equations and long URLs in the reference list. On screen even 5 mm extra on a table looks fine to you. Once the thesis is bound, that 5 mm gets cut off. For a wide table, one way is to put it on its own landscape page with a section break on both sides of it. Or cut it into two smaller tables, that is also fine.

Some offices fix the paper weight also. Anna University asks for 80 GSM or above, and JNTUH asks for 100 GSM bond paper. Give that GSM number to print shop in writing. If you don’t, they will just take the paper lying in their stock.

Fonts, sizes and line spacing

Use the font your university has named, in tables, captions and the reference list also. A format checker will catch mixed fonts first, and mostly they come from text copied out of PDFs and websites.

Word styles will solve most of this. Set the Normal style with your university’s font, size and spacing, and build Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3 on top of Normal. While pasting text, use Paste Special › Unformatted Text. If you forgot and pasted normally, select that text and press Ctrl+Space and the extra formatting goes away. Later if the rule changes, you edit one style only and all the chapters change along with it.

Most rulebooks give one spacing for the body and then make some exceptions for other parts. Many times footnotes, long quotations, the reference list and two-line captions are single-spaced, even when the body text is in 1.5. Anna University has listed these same exceptions. Where your rulebook says nothing about these parts, use the given spacing for body text and check with your guide for the other parts.

While copying, some words come in bold or italic without you noticing. Coloured text and blue hyperlinks also come along with them, so search for these too. The thesis is printed in black. Suppose the examiner finds one blue underlined link on page 140. Straight away the examiner will guess that paragraph was copied from some website.

The front pages, in the right order

Most format corrections come from the front pages. Every university has its own order, and a few also fix the exact wording of each certificate. Write the order from your rulebook as a list and tick each item against your printout.

A usual order goes like title page, your declaration, certificate from your supervisor, acknowledgements, abstract, table of contents, list of tables, list of figures and list of abbreviations. Bangalore University keeps a certificate for evaluation after the two declarations. In Anna University the abstract comes before the acknowledgements. JNTUH asks for a certificate from the head of your institution on the sixth page.

Next go to the title page and check the small informations given there. The title has to match the approved title word for word. In some universities the thesis gets rejected for even one word different from the synopsis title. Your name should be spelt the same as in your records, and JNTUH wants it as given in your SSC or CBSE memo. The month and year should be of the submission, not of the month when you started formatting.

On each certificate keep some empty space where your guide will sign by hand. Scanned signatures, use them only if your office has told you they are okay.

Page numbers, chapters and headings

Out of all the items, page numbering is where most scholars get stuck. As per the usual rule, front pages take small Roman numerals (i, ii, iii), and Arabic numerals start from the first page of Chapter 1. The title page is also counted as i, though no number appears on it.

In Word, put a section break (Layout › Breaks › Next Page) between the front pages and Chapter 1. Go to the header or footer of Chapter 1 and switch off “Link to Previous”. Then choose Insert › Page Number › Format Page Numbers and start the numbering at 1. Anna University wants it in the upper right corner, and many other universities accept the bottom centre.

Heading numbers you should check next. The usual pattern is Chapter 2, then section 2.3, then sub-section 2.3.4. Link Word’s multilevel list to your heading styles and let Word do the numbering. Hand-typed numbers all have to be changed again when you add a new section in between.

The last step here is updating all the fields. Press Ctrl+A to select everything and then press F9. Compare five entries in the table of contents with the actual pages. Sometimes you will see “Error! Bookmark not defined”. Word shows this message when the heading it points to was deleted or retyped. Fix every such line before you print.

Captions, tables, figures and equations

Add every caption through References › Insert Caption. Word can then make the list of tables and the list of figures on its own. Suppose you move Table 3.2 above Table 3.1 later. After you refresh the fields, Word gives both of them the new numbers.

Normally the table caption goes above the table and the figure caption goes below the figure. The chapter number comes first, so the fifth figure of Chapter 4 becomes Figure 4.5. Anna University follows this, and for a long table running into the next page it puts “Table 2.1 (continued)” on top of the second part. Equations get numbers in the same way, like (4.8), and the number is placed on the right side.

Now go through each table and figure along with the text. Each one must be mentioned somewhere in the text before the reader reaches it. The caption in the list should be the same as the caption on the page. If you took a figure from some published paper, give that source right under the figure. A figure copied without the source is a similarity issue and a format issue both.

Check the figures on paper. Axis labels that look clear at 150% zoom are many times too small to read once printed.

Citations and the reference list

Pick one reference style and use the same from the first citation till the last entry. A few universities name the style. Anna University’s manual follows an author–year style and gives its own examples. Osmania’s 2026-27 rules ask for one standard style, for example APA 7, IEEE, Harvard or Oxford. If no style is named, go with your guide and your field.

If you used Zotero or Mendeley, this part can take days less. If you didn’t, do at least three checks by hand. Every citation in the text needs a matching entry in the list. Go the other way also and see that each entry in the list is cited somewhere. The last one is the order of the list, which has to be alphabetical or by number as per your style.

Also find out where your own published papers should go. Anna University does not put them in the reference list and gives them as a separate list. Some other universities want a list of publications before the references, and some want the reprints bound at the back of the thesis.

Printing, binding and the PDF

Before going to the print shop, find out how many copies you have to give, whether the cover is soft or hard, and what should be printed on the cover and the spine. Bharathiar University wants a thin, flexible cover and does not allow hard binding. JNTUH asks for a 300 gsm white soft cover with the lettering in navy blue. Anna University’s wrapper is white art card of 300 gsm, glossy on the outer side.

Make the PDF only from your final Word file, and only after updating all the fields. In Word you can use File › Save As › PDF. If your university asks for Microsoft Print to PDF, as VTU does, use that one. Avoid free online converters, as some of them change the fonts, lose the symbols in equations or put their own watermark on the pages.

Once the PDF is ready, open it and go through it page by page, not just the first few. Look for blank pages, tables that have moved, Greek letters showing as boxes and page numbers starting again. Check the file size also. For Bharathiar University, the online thesis upload has to be below 10 MB.

If the file is still giving trouble in the week the thesis is due, our thesis formatting help can take it up. It works from your university’s own rules and sends back a clean Word file and PDF.

The last check before submission

Before getting the bound copies, print one full copy for yourself. Sit with it and your rulebook and go page by page with a pencil. On this paper copy you will find many mistakes which the laptop screen never show you.

See the first page of every chapter. Each chapter should start on a new page, and on a right-hand page if your rules say so. At the bottom of each page, look for a heading left alone with no text after it. Anna University wants at least two lines of text under a sub-heading before the page ends.

Keep the certificates for the very end, after the page count is final. Some certificates mention the number of pages. If you add a page after they are signed, the count on the certificate becomes wrong.