The double spacing requirements are not very well defined. I even asked the Graduate Studies Office over the phone if I measured the space I between baselines with a 10pt font what the distance should be and they could not tell me – apparently, the correctness criteria is entirely operationalized¹⁾ by the ruler lady. That said, you can use a \baselinestretch of 1.5. I do not recommend asking the Graduate Studies Office about this point either, as they are not familiar with TeX or LaTeX, and seem to mentally model double spacing as if you were actually writing on a typewriter and using a full carriage-return between lines of text.

Depending upon the document class you are using (if you are using LaTeX), it may be a little difficult to set the margins correctly. Specifically, in standard LaTeX classes and the memoir class, the lower margin is the bottom of your text block, whereas for the purposes of submission the lower margin also includes the page number. Brian has told me that the geometry package may make dealing with some of these things easier. I have not yet looked at it myself however.

The first two pages of your dissertation (assuming you are copyrighting it) should not have page numbers. The first numbered page will be iii (lowercase Roman numerals). However, somehow when I configured my document with LaTeX it treated the first two pages as both being page “i” and labeled my third page “ii”. I'm not sure yet what caused this. My quick fix was to use \setcounter{page}{3} on the first numbered page (the dedication page).

I was finding with some printers that they would be out of alignment and print slightly outside the approved margins. Therefore, I opted to make my margins slightly larger just to be sure that even if the printer I was using was or went out of alignment that my dissertation would always be within the approved margins. However, this may have ultimately been too paranoid given the ruler-lady's actual examination (see below).

Remember to make a third copy of just your title page and abstract page to go with the microfilming agreement. This copy of the title page does not need to be signed. I almost forgot about this part.

I was not able to get a good feel for how tight the scheduling of appointments is. It did not see particularly busy the days before Thanksgiving. However, there are probably fewer people depositing for a December graduation too.

It is worthwhile to show up early to your appointment to deposit, because if there is no one scheduled before you, they may take you sooner.

The appointment will probably not take the entire half-an-hour slot that you schedule.

At no point during my appointment did the ruler-lady lift her ruler off the table to measure anything.

The ruler-lady did ask me what size font I used and did ask me if I had double spaced the document.

It pays be to be nice and cooperative when interacting with the ruler-lady. I wound up needing to reprint a few pages of my dissertation, I was offered some spare dissertation quality paper (100% cotton, 20lb or greater, acid free) to reprint the pages. I was also able to come back later that afternoon to deposit those new pages without an appointment.