🚀 go-pugleaf

If the manual is small, much of the decision comes down to the structure and features of the word processor you are using. Many of the features in FM (like chapter numbering) are book-based, so it is best to use books to leverage those features. In some cases (like applying styles or searching), the book is merely a tool (or a hack, depending on your point of view) to get around the problems of having a document spread over several files.

I dare say that, at least for small manuals, some of the reasons given previously for using separate files would be reversed if Frame had a proper outliner.

Just for comparison, I used to use Word for DOS to write small (150-page) manuals back in ye olde days (here we go). Word had the concept of Divisions (each of which had its own page size/layout and numbering scheme), so you didn't need to use separate files for different layouts. It had a stylesheet that was integrated with an outliner - you don't know what "megalomaniacal" means until you've restructured an entire book just by rearranging the outline. It had a limited cross-reference facility that couldn't link between different files. To leverage all of these capabilities you needed to keep the manual in one file, and you would have been a complete idiot to do otherwise (I know, because I met a few and had to pick up the pieces). That was in ye olde days, when a typical manual was 150 pages.

Nowadays, in a large project or manual a single chapter is likely to be 150 pages, a typical manual over 1000 pages, and part of the manual is likely to be in temporary residence over on the translator's system getting translated and conditionalised into Russian. With such large file sizes and demands for access a single file just isn't feasible, so you might as well do what FM have done and have book tools and numbering schemes that can handle multiple files as a coherent group. For large manuals there's really no other way.

(But I still want an outliner.)