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

The WVU Office of Information Technology has created some excellent training tools to assist you with document conversion. They also offer workshops, walk-in clinics and knowledgeable staff are available for consulting on an appointment basis. 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

For tutorials on how to add these creative options to your document, please see the following:

How-to Tutorials (from Virginia Tech)

Technical Problems and some solutions

My graphics files don't show up in Acrobat Reader

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.

Revised 14-Sep-2007