QUESTION :
I am going to write a simple book on programming in Turkish but I am not sure how I design my MS Word doc.
It would be great to have a template to get a head start.
Do you know any?
ANSWER :
Based on our chat and the comments, I see two ways for you:
1. Write the content, let the publisher take care of the rest
This is basically covered by RedGrittyBrick. Write your text first, concentrate on that. Then, convert it to whatever your publisher needs. They will take care of the rest.
If you use Markdown as a writing language of your choice, you can convert it to plenty of other formats with Pandoc, like HTML, LaTeX, PDF, OpenDocument, etc.
See RedGrittyBrick’s answer for a couple of tools to help you start writing and organizing your book.
2. Write it in LaTeX
Almost every single book published in the field of computer science and programming is typeset in a flavor of TeX. If you are a programmer, it shouldn’t take you long to pick up LaTeX and start writing your book using it.
Start out with a few beginner’s examples and then try to include figures and code in your documents. On Windows, use MikTeX as your standard TeX distribution. I once prepared a paper kit for a university tutorial I held which should show you how to do all kinds of stuff in LaTeX. Wikibooks also has a good LaTeX resource.
LaTeX will take care of your table of contents, a proper typography, chapter and section numbering, formatting code and images, etc. Since the structure is more important to TeX than the actual design, you can just write your book using it, and worry about the design later. This is the main difference between WYSIWYG (… “what you get”, i.e. Word and their likes) and languages that specify what you mean.
In most cases, a good publisher will (1) either provide you with detailed LaTeX templates (“classes”) or (2) do the LaTeX design in-house. If something goes wrong in the publishing process, you could actually do it yourself and create an eBook, if you don’t need a top-notch design. LaTeX is meant for writing books, so you will typically get pretty results very fast, once you learn the language.
Unless visual design is the most important feature of your book, most advice I’ve seen recommends you concentrate first only the text. Once you have the text finished, then worry about layout. If you have a professional publisher I would expect them to do that part for you.
Have you considered serious writer’s tools for distraction-free typing like Q10, Darkroom, TextRoom and Scrivener?
