Reply To: Book features vs single document discuss

I love the book feature whenever I’m working on any larger document. Basically, unless you an excellent and powerful computer, you won’t find it easy to deal with hundreds of footnotes. Repaginating a document that large would allow me enough time to take a coffee break before my computer finished one job.

Now, in smaller documents it’s great to stick with one file. However, since footnotes usually reset themselves after each chapter anyway, and since chapters easily stand as their own sections, it’s much safer to incorporate changes in a book file. Reflowing one line of a 100-chapter book requires a second pass through the entire work if you want to make sure the text no longer shows up on the wrong master page–and don’t get me started on running headers in 100 chapters.

I guess it all depends on your tech and your workflow. If you do a lot of academic publishing or have to deal with anything that has numerous chapters, it’s a ton easier to put each chapter as its own document and (excuse the term) “bookify” it. At least, that’s what I’ve found after typesetting numerous books in a series of academic reprints.