General Guidelines for Tables, figures and illustrations in Thesis Writing

Placing and referencing Tables and Figures in the text are commonly faced formatting problems while writing your thesis.

The text in image should be quite large to be read when inserted in the document. The font in figures should be the same size as the text in your thesis. Line Spacing should be single-spaced.

Formatting an image

• Images should be sized to an equivalent print resolution of 300 dpi. This is the basic standard for print-quality images. For better results, images should be inserted as flattened.tif,.png, or.jpg files.
• Crop the images closely to remove blank space and maximize the size using Word or an image editor.

Creating landscaped objects

• Tables and Figure captions should be created as paragraph text and not as part of the object, so that they can be generated into the lists, which appear after the Table of Contents.

• Text wrapping should generally be set as "In Line with Text".

• All your tables and figures should be referred in the text and numbered consecutively and should be placed closely to the original text reference.
• Table captions should be kept above the table and Figure captions beneath the figure.
• Tables and figures should be self explanatory, without any text.
• The term "figure" includes all types of graphic illustrations like charts, graphs, photographs, illustrations, etc.
• The simplest representation is the best and you should avoid using flashy variations. Avoid shadings as they do not reproduce well in black and white. Color can be attractive, but be sure it reproduces well in black and white.

You must use a fixed format for table captions, figures and illustrations throughout the thesis.

• Tables, figures, illustrations and other such items must be numbered consecutively in order of appearance within the thesis.
• There are two main methods for numbering the Tables and Figures: either in sequence throughout the thesis, e.g. 1, 2, 3,4 or chapter number first, then numbered sequentially within each chapter, e.g:

Tables in Chapter 2: Table 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Figures in Chapter 2: Figure 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

The numbering style must be the same for both Tables and Figures.

You should not assume that the reader will make the necessary connection between the text and the figure or table and rather guide the reader in interpreting the information in the table or figure.

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Pankaj Thakur is a freelance blog writer who love to write blogs in different areas.