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The Grand Tour Restoration Project

magico13

By magico13
in KSP Fan Works

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magico13

magico13

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Many people may be familiar with the AAR "The Grand Tour - Voyage To The Planets" by @czokletmuss, a story about a mission to explore all of KSP's planets. I'm not a writer, so I can't possibly do it justice, but it is one of the key items that attached me to KSP. I was lucky enough to be around when it was still being written and it was the first thread I checked when coming to the forum, multiple times per day. Unfortunately, after the forum upgrade, much of the formatting and many of the links were lost. When there's over 60 chapters spread across 100 or so pages of comments it's difficult to follow the story when you can't use the links. Additionally, should the images ever be removed from imgur then much of the content of the story will be forever lost.

So I propose an initiative to restore and preserve The Grand Tour for future readers. The method by which I suggest using to go about this is to use the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine to get the original formatting of the posts and put each chapter into a pdf (using Microsoft Word as a middle-man). There are 70 chapters including the prologue and epilogue, which I can handle by myself given enough time, but crowdsourcing would make it much faster. If you wish to get involved, read the information below about how to do the restoration and post a comment with the chapters you'd like to restore.

Note that this thread is for discussion of the restoration project, any discussion of the story itself should occur in the original thread.

Chapter List

Here is the list of chapters with links to their original posts, the old forum page on the Wayback Machine, and the pdf file for the restored chapter. Credit for finding the current links goes to @silentdragon

If a link is missing, that means the chapter hasn't been restored yet.

First post (archive)

 

Drive folder containing everything

Chapters that have not been claimed:

Chapters 11 through E3

How to contribute:

Here is the procedure I use to get the chapter and convert it into a pdf along with the pdf formatting requirements. It is important that the pdfs remain consistent throughout. This procedure uses Microsoft Word to compile the pdf. I have performed these steps on Word for Mac 2011 and Word for Windows 2010. Things might be different for the version of Word you are using.

      0. Post a comment with the chapters you want to work on. I'd suggest keeping it to batches of 5 or less.

  1. Starting from this page in the Wayback Machine you should be able to use the links to get to any required chapter. You may have to play around with the archive dates and manually changing page numbers in the url to actually access the pages, if they're archived. Most, if not all, pages with a chapter should be archived. If you find one that isn't archived please let us know!
  2. Navigate to the chapter, then select all of the text and images from the chapter (either use your mouse to select it all, or select the first word, scroll to the end of the chapter, then hold shift and click the end of the last word). Copy this to the clipboard with CTRL-C and open a new Word document. Paste the copied data into the Word document. It may take a while as it is downloading the images (it downloads them from the Wayback Machine, not from imgur, if we can find an easy way to get them from imgur instead it would be preferred). Keep track of the URL required to access the page with the chapter in it (URLS to the precise point in the page are not needed, just the URL to the page is fine).
  3. With the chapter copied into Word we must format it correctly. Use the narrow margins preset of 0.5 inch margins on all sides (as the story is image heavy, this allows for larger images). Then resize each image to exactly 7.5 inches in width, with the aspect ratio locked. You can easily do this by selecting the image, then going to the Picture Format tab and finding the size options (generally toward the right). On Windows you can resize images quickly by resizing one, then selecting the next and pressing F4. Non-screenshot images may not need resized, or may need custom sizing. Refer to the chapter to approximate if needed.
  4. There is a faint background color around the text due to shading. Unfortunately this is a pain to remove.
    • On Word for Mac 2011 you can select all of the text with CMD-A, then find the shading options in one of the file menus (I will update when I'm on a mac again). Open the dialog and choose "no color" and apply it to "paragraph", then do that same process again but apply it to "text". This should remove the shading from all text and images, but you can check by changing the page color to black.
    • On Word 2010 for Windows it's slightly more complicated. Again highlight all text, then find the "paint bucket" icon in the Paragraph area of the Home tab. Select the small arrow to the right and choose "No Color". This removes shading just from the images, not the text. You must manually highlight each paragraph and activate the "paint bucket". To ensure that you catch all of the shading, go to Page Layout and set the Page Color to black. Just remember to set it back to "No Color" when finished.
  5. Save the Word document as a .docx file. This will allow for easy editing in the future if needed. Then, save the file again as a pdf. The filename should be "CHAPTER X", where X is the chapter number.
  6. Upload the .docx file and .pdf to a file sharing site (google drive, dropbox, etc). Post a comment or edit your last post if there haven't been new replies with the links to the .docx, .pdf, and the chapter in the Wayback Machine. I will copy them to the Drive folder that everything is being stored in and will add the links to the OP.

Formatting requirements:

  • 0.5 inch margins on all sides
  • Verdana font, size 10 for text and 24 bold for title
  • Images 7.5 inches wide, 4.22 inches tall (lock the aspect ratio, then set the width)
  • Do NOT correct spelling or other textual mistakes
    • Do fix formatting errors (non-closed italic/bold tags, missing bold when BERTY is speaking)
    • It is ok to add a few blank lines to improve the location of text with respect to images or page breaks

For the mods: I'm not totally sure about whether this is allowed. I've sent a PM to @czokletmuss asking permission and letting him know about this, but he's been offline for a long while and might not see it. If you decide this isn't ok, please remove the links to the pdfs but keep the links to the original posts and the Wayback Machine posts since only the pdfs would violate any rules. Even just finding all the correct Wayback Machine posts is worthwhile since they contain the correct formatting and working images.

Edited by magico13
Chapters 6 through 10
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