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How To Create ETD Files

What is an ETD? | Creating PDF Files | ETD Development | Technical Problems / Solutions

What is an ETD?

An Electronic Thesis or Dissertation (ETD) is a document that explicates the research of a graduate student- it is expressed in a form simultaneously suitable for machine archives and worldwide retrieval.

Similar to paper... The ETD is similar to its paper predecessor. It has figures, tables, footnotes, and references. It has a title page with your name, the name of your school, and the names of your committee members. It documents your years of academic commitment. It describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work as recorded in the literature, the research methods used, the results, and the interpretation and discussion of the results, and a summary with conclusions.

Only different... The ETD is different, though. It provides a technologically-advanced medium for expressing your ideas. You prepare your ETD using nearly any word processor or document preparation system, incorporating relevant multimedia objects, without the requirement to submit multiple copies on 50% cotton bond paper. Consequently, ETDs are less expensive to prepare, consume virtually no library shelf space, and never collect dust. They are available to anyone that can browse the Web.

Creating PDF Files

Workshops to assist you on producing a ETD are offered by the Center for Instrutional Technology in the Drinko Library on the Huntington campus. If you are on the Charleston campus you can contact Teresa Eagle <:t.eagle@marshall.edu> for assistance. For additional information about access to Adobe Acrobat and other pdf software, see the Submission Process page, Document Conversion section.

Suggestions for ETD Development

We encourage the use of all of the available options in Adobe Acrobat Exchange. By doing so, your ETD will be easier to view and browse and will encourage users to navigate through your entire ETD. These options will add to the look and feel of the document.

Some of these include:

• Adding Bookmarks
• Adding Thumbnails
• Adding Yellow Stickies
• Adding Links to the List of Figures
• Adding Links to the List of Tables
• Adding Links to the Table of Contents
• Linking to Internal Multimedia Objects
• Linking to External Multimedia Objects
• Adding Hyperlinks

Technical Problems and some solutions

John Hagen at WVU has reported on the following problems:

• My graphics files don't show up in Acrobat Reader

An Engineering graduate student who produced graphic images with a "plotting" program and had pasted the images into his word perfect files. When he used PDF Writer to create the pdf files for his dissertation, the images were clearly in place, but when he tried to view them with the Acrobat Reader, he could only see the text portion of the file. The graphics were missing.

We tried to reproduce this situation on my computer. Strangely, the .pdf files that I produced had the graphics, but the text was missing. After trying several things, I installed the postscript driver for Adobe Distiller 3.0 (in the drivers directory of the installation disk). That fixed the problem.

The lesson appears to be that the Adobe Postscript driver is the more reliable way to create pdf from postscript files.
 

• SigmaPlot or SigmaStat Files

 

These were made by a company called Jandel Scientific software. That company was recently purchased by SPSS. We believe the student would need to go back into the Sigma software package and either export the content to a Postscript printer file document, or create a report from the software in a format such as rich text format that a standard word processor could read and export to Postscript. At this point Adobe Acrobat Distiller should be able to create the pdf files you need.