<p>The official titles and credit worths of my senior year classes as well as my activity descriptions are cut off in the print preview. Is this a glitch with the print preview or does the commonapp really allow more space to type than what actually shows up on the final applications?</p>
<p>Everyone on the forums keeps telling me to be safe rather than sorry, but I find it pretty doubtful that an online application used by 400+ schools would have this big of a problem with its system. After all, why in the world would they allow more characters than what was going to actually show up when the application is printed off? </p>
<p>It just seems very irresponsible and downright to me, but if you could give me an answer I'd be eternally grateful.</p>
<p>When this is all over, everyone should get together and mount a protest against the Common App organization. For now, just type the most important information in the beginning of the line and hope for the best.</p>
<p>The reason for the character limit/space limit discrepancy is that different characters have different widths, so for instance,</p>
<p>iiiii
wwwww</p>
<p>In both cases, there are 5 characters, but obviously, the space that they take up is very different. That is why the character limit is just an approximation</p>
<p>^That doesn’t excuse the Common App folks. They could easily use a mono-spaced font that’s widely supported, such as Courier, to avoid that problem.</p>
<p>Go ahead and shorten it so that it fits. They might be able to get the stuff that’s cut off, but that doesn’t mean they have the time to or that they will</p>
<p>This has been a problem for me not only in the description but also even in my mom’s position at work. “Associate Professor” doesn’t even fit without getting cut off…</p>
<p>This Common App business is ridiculous. They only have to write ONE application and they can’t even get it right.</p>
<p>I know most people say not to abbreviate things on the common app, but I ending up changing ‘and’ to ‘&’ in many cases. I managed to cut everything down so everything showed up on the print previews (minus the latter half of the letter ‘s’ in ‘credits’ for one of my senior year courses… I think the adcoms will be smart enough to figure that one out… hopefully!). I just successfully submitted my common app to my ED school.</p>
<p>Still, I stand by what I said earlier. If 400+ schools and thousands of kids use this application, you would think they would work out all the kinks. (At the same time, I’m no computer coder, so I really don’t fully grasp all the work that would take, and other than that one kink with printing, the common app seems to work very nicely.)</p>
<p>i agree is this a problem?
because i just put the most important stuff in the front. still it looks awkward if they print this application out and see words just cut off halfway…</p>
<p>I guess all we can do is hope that the admission officers are as smart as they are made out to be, and they’ll be cunning enough to make out a cut-off word or description.
Good luck to us all!</p>