🚀 go-pugleaf

Just a small note to Dave, Philip, and perhaps others:

I have written relatively small manuals, 4 to 25 pages, where the book construct is used to its great advantage. These manuals are then translated into several languages. The usefulness of a book structure has nothing to do with size or length, it is more about "complexity". Whenever anything like a cover page, a TOC, a glossary, a CE declaration etc is used, a book is much better than a monolithic file. (And, of course, if it is really large, you MUST use a book, but you already knew that.) FM is often touted as the tool for "long documents"; I think that description is very misleading, since I think it has nothing to do with length, but rather complexity and reuse.

I also write single-file documents where that is useful. Things that do not have cover pages, perhaps not even a TOC, often no imported graphics. Things like reports or instructions. FM is just as useful for that -- much more useful than e.g Word. So the recommendation is: use books when that is useful, use single-file documents when that is useful.

As for an outliner: For those of us who use Structured FrameMaker, with structured documents, we DO have an outliner! The structure view IS the outliner! And of course one can restructure an entire book (or chapters, or lists, or...) just by rearranging the elements in the structure view! Very convenient!