Custom Styles in Formatly: Beyond Standard Guidelines
Your department handbook is not APA, MLA, or Chicago exactly. Define custom style rules and reuse them across every submission.
Institutional thesis committees and academic journals frequently enforce idiosyncratic styling guidelines that deviate from standard APA, MLA, or Chicago manuals. Accommodating non-standard page margins, custom line spacings, institutional front matter templates, and hybrid citation conventions requires flexible rule definitions to maintain automated compliance.
Plenty of submissions do not follow a published manual at all. Departments issue handbooks with house rules — 1.5″ margins, italic chapter headings, a project report cover page — and journals layer submission requirements on top of a base style.
A tool that only speaks APA and MLA leaves those documents to manual work. Custom styles close the gap: define the rules once, apply them to every document after.
Standard Styles vs Custom Styles
| Aspect | Standard Styles | Custom Styles |
|---|---|---|
| Source of rules | Published manuals (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Turabian) | Your department handbook, journal guidelines, or thesis office rules |
| Best for | Standard coursework | Institution-specific requirements, repeated across documents |
| Setup | None — select the style | Define once, reuse on every submission |
| Typical trigger | Assignment says “APA 7th” | Assignment says “follow the faculty project handbook” |
Let Formatly apply these rules for you
Upload your document and get a correctly formatted APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard document in seconds — with full tracked changes.
What to Capture From Your Handbook
Pull the mechanical requirements into one list before configuring anything: margins, font, line spacing, heading treatment per level, page numbering, and the citation layout. Most handbooks are a page or two — the work is transcription, not interpretation.
The reward is amortization: a style defined once applies to every future document in that program, which is precisely the repetitive workload automation should absorb. The base styles themselves are described on the citation styles page.
Expert Tip: When your handbook is ambiguous, ask the course office which interpretation they enforce — then encode that answer in the custom style. A documented decision beats re-litigating the ambiguity on every paper.
Automated, but Still Audited
Custom styles run through the same engine as the standards: deterministic rules, tracked changes, and the Citation & Structure Audit™ for structural errors, heading gaps, and citation–reference mismatches. The scope of what is checked is summarized on the features page, and the standard-style workflow is introduced in getting started with Formatly.
Eliminate Formatting Stress with Formatly
Spending hours adjusting indents, citation punctuation, and margin settings pulls focus away from your actual research and arguments. Formatly automates your paper’s layout to ensure 100% compliance with official style guides before you submit.
Ready to save time and eliminate grading penalties? Upload your document to Formatly to generate a perfectly formatted paper with tracked changes instantly.
Format your manuscript in seconds
Stop fighting with margins, headings, and lists. Upload your document and let our engine instantly apply APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard standards — with full tracked changes.