Confusion with chapters vs. sections

Question

Reviewing the InDesign support documents, I found this:
"You can add a chapter number variable to your document. Like page numbers, chapter numbers can be updated automatically and formatted and styled as text. A chapter number variable is commonly used in documents that are part of a book. A document can have only one chapter number assigned to it; if you want to divide a single document into chapters, you can create sections instead."
I'm assuming this does NOT mean that documents can't have multiple chapters numbered 1, 2, 3... since that is possible. If that's the case, what does this mean when it says "a document can only have one chapter number assigned to it"?
Does this mean only one chapter variable per document, where sections would allow you to be more flexible with numbers and order?

Answer 1

Hello Landdogger.
I agree that is worded rather confusingly in the InDesign Help.
If you want to use the Chapter Number text variable to automatically number your chapters, you will need to build each chapter (and a chapter is generally an InDesign Section as well) as a single InDesign document. This is because an InDesign document can only have ONE Chapter Number value assigned.
So if you were to build a single InDesign document with 10-Chapters, each being an InDesign section, then by default each Chapter Number would be "1".
To work with multiple Chapters and use the Chapter Number text variable for numbering the chapters:
build a chapter template containing all masters, styles etc.
use this template as the base for building the individual InDesign documents for each Chapter in your publication
create a File > New > Book and Add (Chapters) Documents to the InDesign Book
*then renumber the Chapter Number from within the InDesign Book panel: the Chapter Numbers in the InDesign Book will automatically be updated.
See also: http://bit.ly/clhRMf for more info.
Hope this helps.
Cari
www.twitter/carijansen
www.carijansen.com