Continue from previous number is skipping numbers (or, rather, letters)

Question

I've tried to find a specific answer here in the forum for this situation but keep coming up with variations that don't quite match my situation, so, my apologies if this post is redundant to something I haven't found yet.

I am designing a text book. It has a system of three topic levels, for which I've created para styles of Lev 1, Lev 2, and Lev 3. I have them all set up to continue from previous number. I manually restart with each new chapter, but after that, it should flow in order. However, I'm in Chapter 3 and all of a sudden, Lev 2 is skipping from "A" to "D." I can't figure out what might be causing it. I thought maybe I had too much RAM tied up (even though I have 32GB), so I restarted the computer. It didn't change anything. I've examined the paragraph style several times, and it is set up correctly (plus it worked in the first two chapters). I've done a search for the Lev 2 paragraph style in case I'd accidentally applied it to a random return, etc., and the search goes straight from "A" to the one that is coming up as "D." Nothing in between. I don't know what else to try. I have this whole book to work on and would rather not have to manually label or keep track of all these topics. If anyone knows the fix for this, I'd appreciate your response. Thanks in advance!

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UPDATE:

I thought I found the problem, but, nope, it's still happening. I can get by, manually restarting "D" to be "B," which I just did, and fortunately, the numbers following do continue after that as they should. But I'd still like to know what is causing this problem to start with. It may be a mystery no one can solve.

casinclaire · Accepted Answer

You could easily import your text styles into a new document and type in enough basic text to demonstrate the problem.

However, I suspect your numbered lists are conflicting with one another. Have you given each list style a specific name/id so they don't conflict?

I took your advice and imported the styles into another document and started experimenting. When I set up some dummy text and it was all right in front of me on one page instead of having to flip back and forth in a long document, it was much easier to narrow in and see what was happening and at least get some direction of where to look more closely.

I narrowed it down to something going on with the Lev 2 heading and excamined the bullets/numbering options again. The one thing I had not thought about -- because I never actually touch this setting and don't know how it got set the way it was -- was the "Level" of the numbering. In the problematic style, the Level of the numbering was set at "2" instead of "1." No idea how that happened! I have never even paid attention to that setting. But as soon as I flipped it back to "1," the order of the numbers all fell right into place. So I guess that was the problem! Thanks for the suggestion to import to another doc. It made things much clearer and, finally, solvable! Thanks so much. 🙂

Dave Creamer of IDEAS · Answer

It would be useful to see your document. In the mean time, I've attached an InDesign document with some examples of multi-level numbering for you to review.

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