Formatting Formatting Formatting

7/7/2017

Hey there LiftPort Crew!

Been awhile since my last post so I thought I’d give you guys an update on my daily life here at LiftPort. For the past few weeks, my team and I have been working diligently on finishing our college level textbook on the Lunar Space Elevator Infrastructure. Along with writing pieces here and there, my primary job has been formatting the textbook and making all of our 100,648 words (so far) look like an actual book. Surprisingly enough I have found that I enjoy it more than writing because its much simpler and my brain likes when things are organized. All that aside, it has been a very aggravating process that has proven extremely tedious.

Being that the closest thing to honestly formatting anything in the real world is a manual that I wrote for an old company that I used to work for. That manual was 12 pages and had little to do with space and physics and all the complicated stuff that goes into building LSEI also, did I mention the book is 286 pages? I had no idea where, or how to begin.

“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”

And so I started at the beginning, and kept a note cheat sheet (ill post it with the blog). I went through the doc and put page breaks at the end of every section so I could be sure I was done with a chapter. Following this step, I began captioning pictures, tables, and graphs and making sure they were in the margins, text wrapped and located in the right spot. Finally, I organized all the headings and their respective levels. In the end, when I write it out it doesn’t sound like much which is strange because it has taken me a long time to complete.

Anyways, that’s what I have been up to and I can honestly say it felt rewarding once I formatted it all. There are still some sections that haven’t been written which means it’s far from done. However, it is very satisfying to see this huge document get closer and closer to being a book, I can’t wait for us to get this thing published!

You’re all going to love it,
Griffin