How many chapters in a book?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
March 28, 2014
1 reply
553 views

Is there a limit to the number of chapter files that can go into a single FrameMaker book?

I'm thinking that a few pages per chapter would work well when I export it to the web, but I'm wondering if 500 chapter files will choke book generation when I'm trying to make a PDF.

Does anyone have experience with this? I've built large (1,000 pages) manuals before, but never broken them down into such small chapters.

Advice appreciated.

book

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Arnis Gubins

Inspiring

AFAIK, there is no (practical) limit. The book file is essentially a pointer to the actual files. For a summary of known FM limitations/quirks Klaus Daube has compiled an excellent reference at:

http://daube.ch/docu/fmaker25.html

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

> AFAIK, there is no (practical) limit.

The various versions of Windows have limits on the number of files open to a single process, which might be as low as 2048. Irrespective of the OS limit, the limit might as low as 500 if Adobe used a specific C library for file ops. DOS was 255, in case this is about FM3 on Win 3.1 .

But even this wouldn't be a problem as long as you avoid having every component file open at once. The Update Book and Print/Save-As appear to open only the book and one component at a time.

There doesn't appear to be any limit to the number of files in a directory in recent Windows, but more than a few thousand will get tedious to manage.

If I were planning a book with a bazillion chapters, I'd test it with dummy files first.

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