numbering chapters in nested books

[4everJang]

I have tried all the options available to me, but FrameMaker keeps getting it all wrong. There must be a way to do this, but I cannot figure it out. Maybe someone else has experience with this and can point out where the solution is. Or maybe someone from Adobe can explain what the thinking behind the book numbering scheme is, so that I can figure out how to adapt it to my needs.

Here is the setup (simplified): I have a master book with a couple of chapters and some nested books.

master book

• chapter 1
• chapter 2
• nested book A
  • chapter A1
  • chapter A2
  • chapter A3
• chapter 3
• nested book B
  • chapter B1
  • chapter B2
• chapter 4

I cannot use folders or groups as the nested books must also be available as separate books for publishing to the online help system. This is the reason for choosing books over groups or folders in the first place. In the online help system I do not need any chapter numbering, so everything works fine. But now that I also need to produce a PDF, the numbering logic (or lack thereof) is giving me a hard time. I want to get consecutive chapter numbers in the entire book, regardless of whether the chapters are in the main book or a nested one. I am running a script to explicitly set the numbering on each chapter as follows:

master book

• chapter 1
• chapter 2
• nested book A
  • chapter 3
  • chapter 4
  • chapter 5
• chapter 6
• nested book B
  • chapter 7
  • chapter 8
• chapter 9

Setting all chapters to use the following number makes all the nested chapters come out with the same chapter number. This must be considered a bug, which means I need to find a way around it. I have tried all other options (setting the chapter number explicitly in each of the nested chapters, and setting the numbering properties of the book components to "read from file"). But when I update the book, FM keeps complaining about inconsistent numbering in the nested books, and telling me it is using the numbering in the main book. I either get all chapters in the nested books showing the first available chapter number or the last one in that nested book. If I tell FM to not update the numbering, it looks OK (as I have done the numbering explicitly for each chapter) but when I save to PDF, even when setting DoNotNotifyAPIClients to true, FM messes up the numbering before creating the PDF.

Does anyone have an idea on either the numbering scheme logic, or how to tell the Save as PDF to keep its fingers off the numbering as it currently appears? It would be really useful if I can get an answer TODAY. The deadline is approaching and this project must be finished before Xmas.

Thanks in advance

Jang

[Bob_Niland]

I've not used the book-of-books feature in newer FMs, but for this problem I might be tempted to create a new .book container file that then pulls in all the chapter files as desired, and as needed, uses book-level Numbering Properties to set the numbering for that [new] book.

Existing books remain unaffected, until you have a flash of brilliance on how to tweak their numbering so it works more optimally with varied parent .books.

[4everJang]

That is what I have done in the end. I guess nobody has been using the nested book feature in a production environment where PDFs of the overall book are required. Or they are using volume numbers for the nested books. The hassle in the new book solution is that the table of contents and possible indexes will have to be regenerated as well. If the structure of the top-level book does not change once it is created, this only needs to be done once. But I cannot rely on that, and I cannot rely on the customer being able to redo the work without running into all kinds of trouble. So my script will have to handle all possible corner cases. I have done it in the past and it is really a hassle to do it, either manually or programmatically. Oh well, it's all in a consultant's day's work, I guess.