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A
Anonymous
October 20, 2016
Question

Is there a limit to the number of series for numbered lists?

  • October 20, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 470 views

My document contains hundreds of numbered lists which are all unique lists (series). Framemaker Help (2015) tells me to format text as numbered lists by:

Display the Numbering properties of the Paragraph Designer and enter a series label in the Autonumber Format box if you need more than one autonumber series in the document.

A series label consists of any single printable character followed by a colon (for example, S:).

However, if I have hundreds of lists, once I've worked my way through the alphabet and every other single printable character, does that mean I've run out of series labels for that document?

I've worked my way through upper case and lowercase letters, and am starting on numbers and symbols but I can't see a way I can label more than say about 80 series of numbered lists before I run out of unique single characters.

Is there a limit?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Bob_Niland
Community Expert
Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 20, 2016

Barb has covered the issue at hand, but since anyone else searching on the wider question of limits on Series Labels is apt to hit this thread, here's a deep link to an older one that drilled down on that topic:

Re: Conditional text and table numbers

It appears that in FM8 and later, the number of Series Labels you can have might be limited only by the number of displayable glyphs in Unicode, although possibly just those the BMP (Plane 0), but that's still tens of thousand of characters.

Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 20, 2016

That's an interesting thread, Bob. Thanks for sharing.

I remember the old (very old!) courseware from Frame Technologies specifically said that they were limited to uppercase characters, and being a rule-follower by nature, I opted to memorize that, but never tested it. Then I'd see my students using all sorts of alternatives, and they worked just fine. It's nice to see the actual answer written out as "any printable character".

Of course in real life, I tend to use just a few, and prefer the logical letters (i.e., H: for heads) also mentioned in that post.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 20, 2016

You can have lots of series labels in an Fm doc (start with the uppercase alphabet and you'll have 26) but you don't need that in this situation.

All of the lists can use a single series label, or since you are allowed one unnamed series, could omit the label altogether. The confusion stems from your need to restart each separate list, so take a look at these two options:

https://www.rockymountaintraining.com/adobe-framemaker-how-to-restart-a-numbered-list/

Come back to clarify if you aren't clear after reading the post.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
A
Anonymous
October 21, 2016

Thanks for your reply Barb.

I found I needed to allocate a series label to my numbered lists because if I didn't the autonumbering of the subsequent section header would be disrupted. For example, go to 8.0.1 instead of 8.6.1. When I used a series label in my numlists, the problem with the subsequent section header autonumbering would resolve itself.

Also to make the following simple list (example)

1. Rice

2. Bread

3. Fruit

     a. Bananas

     b. Apples

     c. Pears

4. Cheese

I thought I needed to assign a series label (A:) to the Rice, Bread, Fruit, Cheese and then another (B:) to the Bananas, Apples, Pears to force the list to count correctly at the change to Bananas and then back to Cheese.

As you can tell, I'm quite the novice and solving my problems by trial and error. The series label has always worked well, but then I've never dealt with some many unique lists in one document.

Thanks again.

Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 21, 2016

I thought I needed to assign a series label (A:) to the Rice, Bread, Fruit, Cheese and then another (B:) to the Bananas, Apples, Pears to force the list to count correctly at the change to Bananas and then back to Cheese.

No, they are the same list. They might be set up as:

¶ btwn lists          L:< =0>< =0 >

Rice, Bread           L:<n+>< =0>\t

Bananas Apples   L:< ><a+>\t

Spaces don't show. The n produces a numbered list, the a produces an alpha numeric list.

subsequent section header would be disrupted

Use H: perhaps, for the Section numbers to differentiate them from any other series in the document.

¶ between the lists to restart the counters:

Level 1 (1,2,3):

Level 2 (a,b,c):

This will work for all the lists in the document.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
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