Help using Scrivener to write a programming book

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Hi all,

This isn’t really a technical support question, but I wasn’t sure where else to post it! I’m currently looking at using Scrivener to author a sizeable book on game programming. I’ve watched a good number of the videos available on the site and had a play with the full package, which I’m really liking. But I’m wondering if anyone can offer any insights into authoring the sort of book I need to write?

Specifically:

  1. How to handle inserting large chunks of source code into the document (and having it not spell checked, monospaced, etc)

  2. How to build a comprehensive index (programming books always need good solid indexes, referencing coding terms and page numbers through-out)

  3. Referencing other chapters, regardless where I eventually move those to.

And basically if you’ve done anything like this before, or similar, I’d love to know what you’d recommend for a good Binder set-up!

Cheers,

Rich

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I’ll leave it to others more qualified than I to answer your specific queries, but in terms of seeing it action, check out the Scrivener Documentation and Support - which includes the source Scrivener project of the Scrivener manuals.

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  1. I suspect Multimarkdown (MMD) is the most robust way to format within Scrivener for text with lots of interspersed code blocks, with the proviso that you don’t use indentation for other purposes…
  2. For the indexing, I think this is out of the scope of Scrivener — the technical choice is probably MMD → Latex — but I don’t have experience of what is best for index generation…
  3. Scrivener → Help → Placeholder Tags List… is your friend :slight_smile: