In my experience, formatting is just about the only thing that a department/university cares about (outside of the folks on the committee), and they will send back a thesis until they're satisfied with the formatting, and that means lost time. Perhaps throwaway_7274's department has a reputation for particular attention to (meaningless) detail.

While there are formatting guidelines, I've never seen them so specific that you could only easily do it in Latex. Is that really common?

I've never actually see it as the assumed default option.. Maybe a decade back I could see that.. but not now.

The matter isn't really that something is possible only in latex, but that a department/university might have its own template/document class of arbitrary complexity that you would have to reimplement

> department/university might have its own template/document class of arbitrary complexity

I think there is a limit to how complex they can be. If you can't do it relatively easily in Word, then it's probably going to create too many complaints for the bureaucrats

I think there’s a Latex template you can use, or you have to make your own document that looks as similar as possible. It’s not a list of guidelines but a template that specifies how it’s supposed to look.

that is a good observation, but it actually proves that the riskiest thing you could do with your time is a meaningless credentialist PHD, instead of actually learning skills that rich people will pay you for immediately without the pomp and circumstance

If you don’t understand what they mean and are hunting for pedantic discoveries in explanations of a problem, then please try to dig deeper and contribute more meaningfully, as per the HN guidelines.

> to use a different program for turning equations to pixels?

They explain in the comment why it was risky (new thing instead of tried and true methods, not a large user base, etc.) and yet you minimized their explanation, over simplified and seem to not understand the risk involved in writing one of the most important pieces of literature in one’s career.

> why? they wont give you a phd if a single pixel is off by one bit in the alpha channel?

They meant pixel perfect as in matching the template to infer the importance of this. Then for some reason you went down the “off by one bit in the alpha channel” which is a bit of wise-assery and not meaningful nor necessary to the conversation.

As I said before, please dig deeper and use your well meaning System 2 to contribute, and not your Reddit-Tainted System 1.