The Scottish government is promising the most comprehensive blueprint for a new independent country ever published, a 670-page guide to creating a new state that will include a frequently asked questions section with 650 answers.

Called Scotland's Future – Your Guide to an Independent Scotland, and running to 170,000 words in length, its contents have been tightly controlled by first minister Alex Salmond's staff and the civil service to avoid leaks.

The white paper will be published online at 10am on Tuesday after a yearlong gestation period. It will be released in in ebook format and in hard copy, with an initial print run of 20,000.

Success for the Scottish National party government at next year's independence referendum on 18 September 2014 largely hangs on this document's credibility and coherence.

Scottish ministers have said the prospectus will have five sections, running to 10 chapters, divided between its aspirations for the future and its immediate plans for the bedrock issues, such as Scotland's currency, its debt negotiations with the UK and its position on acquiring more than 80% of North Sea oil and gas reserves – that part it says which lie in Scotland's territorial waters.

Those issues are uppermost among the issues the Scottish government believes it must agree with the UK government before declaring independence day on 26 March 2016. Getting rid of Trident nuclear submarines on the river Clyde may be among those immediate goals.

Next, it is thought, will come the policy pledges it will make were it to win the first election for an independent Scottish parliament in May 2016 – those pledges which would take longer to implement.

The SNP's central strategy is to target key electoral groups who are either the most likely to back independence or the largely reluctant but necessary to win over: the SNP has mastered this technique, using sophisticated data and surveys to identify specific demographics.

In the former category are leftwing, younger voters, small business owners and the urban working class. Women and young mothers, and pensioners fall in the latter.

Ministers have already promised to abolish the bedroom tax and there are reports they would abandon the universal credit welfare reform, too. Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister, has promised action on a higher minimum wage and action on child care. Older voters were lured in September with promises of earlier retirement ages, and better-protected pensions.

Salmond wants a Scottish corporation tax rate 3% lower than the UK's, and recently promised an independent Scotland would renationalise Royal Mail. Small businesses will win tax breaks. There is likely to be a promise too on a new property tax or local income tax, to replace the outdated council tax system.

All these pledges will be expensive and, coupled with the political need to protect free tuition fees and free personal care, Salmond knows that his strategy and honesty on the economy will be central to the guide's credibility.

The repeated attacks on his insistence that Scotland and the UK should share the pound, in a formal currency union, and warnings about the decline in oil income from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the UK government raise substantial questions about the viability of his proposals.

The Scottish government needs to find proposals and language able to neutralise or deflect the UK government's highly detailed but specialised attacks on financial policy, pensions, currency and defence in its Scotland Analysis series, written by teams of Whitehall civil servants.

And central to that quest for credibility will be the Scottish government's riposte to claims and arguments – fuelled by European commission president José Manuel Barroso – that it will have to reapply for European Union membership as a new member state, and in so doing – say some sceptics – commit to joining the euro or renouncing any claim to a share of the UK's rebates and opt-outs.

The document is being deliberately written and structured to make it user-friendly; it is also being crafted to allow Yes Scotland and SNP campaigners to use it as their bible and template for the next 10 month's campaigning.

At Yes Scotland's launch in May last year, Salmond said it would be the largest grassroots movement in British political history: he set a target of one million voters for the Yes declaration supporting independence. The last figure for that – 372,103 – was released in May; he may unveil a new figure today.

SNP strategists, who see the mainstream media as largely hostile on independence, are putting immense emphasis on reaching voters directly, though doorstep campaigning, social media, rallies and street stalls.

From today, the SNP and Yes Scotland are planning to print and hand out several million leaflets in coming weeks, using the white paper as their source; Better Together, the pro-UK campaign, will be at railway stations, ports and airports from 7am this morning/Tuesday morning handing out their own material, attacking Salmond's economic policies and pushing the case for the UK.

They are particularly focusing on the don't knows: those voters the Yes campaign believes are the most likely to switch to them. The polls differ on how many don't knows there are: most average at about 16% but two by TNS-BMRB put that figure as high as 32%. That is a very large number of persuadable voters.

Even so, support for independence has consistently hovered at around a third of Scotland's voters, despite months of campaigning by Yes Scotland and battles over policy with the UK government.

Professor John Curtice, the elections expert with Strathclyde University and the Scottish Centre for Social Research, says the headline average of the polls puts the yes vote at 32% and the no vote at 49%. Taking out don't knows, leaves the figures at 39% in favour of independence and 61% against.

The latest poll by Panelbase for the Sunday Times and Real Radio found the gap between a no and yes vote was just 10%, excluding "don't knows", with 45% of those committed voters agreeing with independence.

That would leave Salmond needing a modest 5% swing to win.

But a far larger superpoll of 10,000 people by the Tory former treasurer Lord Ashcroft conducted between February and May 2012 put the gap at a far greater 71% against and 29% in favour, again excluding don't knows.

And the next series of polls could show how successful this white paper has been in lifting the yes vote; its publication will likely energise pro-independence campaigners, giving them the ammunition and impetus to close the gap with no voters. Salmond will be hoping to see the yes vote convincingly and consistently rise above 40% by the New Year.

The longer that takes, the steeper the slope his campaign has to climb before next September's referendum.