The last thing you want when submitting a major thesis is for unexpected problems to crop up at the last minute. Even if they do, you need to have a plan for dealing with them which doesn’t involve exporting the text into a wordprocessor to finish the job.
This paper describes some of the most commonly-underused techniques for providing the safety-net which can rescue success from the jaws of defeat. It is based on the author’s experience of supporting LaTeX in an academic environment as well as in commercial publishing.