Thesis Docx

• If Word is missing, COM is unavailable, or DOM access fails:
  • Stop the automation-heavy plan.
  • Tell the user to install desktop Microsoft Word.
  • Explain briefly that WPS or similar tools are likely to degrade layout fidelity for thesis formatting.

Style Strategy

• Treat styles as the single source of truth for formatting.
• Prefer these logical style buckets:
  • Body Text
  • Heading 1 / Heading 2 / Heading 3
  • Figure Caption
  • Table Caption
  • References
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • Appendix Title
• If the document already has equivalent styles, map to them and normalize their font, spacing, indentation, and numbering behavior.
• If direct formatting conflicts with styles, reduce the direct formatting and bring the document back under style control.
• Do not globally normalize sections that the school guide does not specify. Examples of high-risk overreach:
  • page header/footer redesign when the user only asked for headings
  • changing code box appearance when the task is only about references
  • normalizing table internals when the school guide does not regulate them
• When a visual issue remains after style normalization, inspect hidden OOXML state such as firstLineChars, numbering indentation, titlePg, differentFirstPageHeaderFooter, REF field display text, and direct run formatting.

Audit-First Discipline

Before bulk editing, produce and internally follow a checklist like this:

1. Which parts are explicitly regulated by the school guide?
2. Which parts are user-defined house rules?
3. Which parts are currently acceptable and must be preserved?
4. Which problems are structural vs. visual-only?
5. Which fixes can be done safely through styles?
6. Which fixes require Word COM or OOXML-level patching?

Do not say "finished" merely because a structural audit looks good. For thesis work, pagination and page-level rendering are part of correctness.

High-Risk Pitfalls

Read references/failure-patterns-and-quality-gates.md before large-scale formatting work. In particular, guard against:

• style names that look correct but map to the wrong style IDs
• paragraph-level direct formatting that overrides the intended style
• firstLineChars or numbering indentation creating invisible extra indents
• TOC fields or cross-reference fields showing stale display text
• section-level first-page settings causing missing headers or page numbers
• Word vs. WPS differences for table row height, vertical alignment, and code box title clipping
• punctuation normalization that accidentally rewrites DOI, URLs, code, or English references

Visual Review Rule

For school-format-sensitive thesis work, final verification should prefer this