Multi-level numerical outline lists are impossible

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
August 11, 2023
2 replies
355 views

Folks, I have the lastest release of Indesign 2023 (Mac Ventrura 13.4) and am making a book. I have anb original created in Word that has lots of hierarchical lists: 1, 1.1, 1.1.1. All of these levels automatically update as new headings are added: 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.1.2, 1.2,3, etc. I have tried EVERYTHING to reproduce these in InDesign using Paragraph Styles per the information in the ID User's Guide. Nothing works, the successive levels have no relationship to the metacharacters suggested in the guide. First level is 1, second level is 2.2 instead of 1.2.. I'm really stuck and hope someone has a fix or work-around. BTW, none fo the various Youtube videos are able to address this issue. Thanks in advance!

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pixxxelschubser

Community Expert

InDesign is at least as flexible as Microsoft Word.

See this topic (unfortunately in German):

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/vereinssatzung-schreiben/td-p/11610252

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Yes, both apps will do hierarchical numbering of staggering complexity. But only Word has that two-level, somewhat opaque system for setting up such numbering, but blithely allows you to set up somethiung almost working using the other approach.

(I just noticed the Word component here on a second pass... sorry not to have been clearer earlier.)

D

dlr07043Author

Participant

Thanks, James. I finally got it worked out exactly as I had hoped. I'll
post some screen grabs later today in the community.

Every time I used Word for long documents, it would eventually barf and
mess up everything. If I was to bold face a few words in a paragraph, it
would often bold the entire document! Just awful.

Anyway, thanks.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

First, such hierarchies should be created from descending parent levels — base level 2 on level 1, level 3 on level 2, etc. And it helps if you assign this hierarchy to its own, named List name, not [Default], even if you have only one numbering hierarchy in the doc.

Second — do you have the actual Level setting correct for each level?

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Addendum: this feature in Word can be very fragile, as you have to use the MultiLevel List feature to set it up and making changes using just the numbering and list menus will be essentially local overrides. (I just did a huge legacy document using this numbering system, and fixing the numbering against the kind of faults you describe "durn near kilt me.") But setting up the ID paragraph styles according to ID's requirements, as I briefly noted above, should create consistent lists and numbering regardless of how it was imported from Word.

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