Why does paragraph-numbering not work?

[Thomas_Calvin]

I have numbering working in various places throughout my documents, but here it won't work. Why?

[jmlevy · Accepted solution]

It is because the field “numbers” is empty. It can't be empty. See my screenshot:

You must have at least ^# which is the automatic numbering symbol.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks! I just tried again in another area and this field defaulted to empty, leaving the user with no clue as to what is supposed to go in there.

[jmlevy]

But you wrote: 

I have numbering working in various places

How did you do if this field is empty? And this is very strange, I never found it empty (without manually deleting the content). There is a submenu avalaible here:

[Thomas_Calvin]

I thought it might be because I had previously deleted the field's contents, wanting to get rid of a Tab character; but I just tried that and no... even if I put something in there, it's empty the next time I try to set up numbering.

That pop-up menu doesn't help, because it doesn't appear to contain the actual element that you're trying to place; it just lets you insert characters that you can't type.

Further investigation reveals that one of the core styles in my document had numbering "activated," but with no number set. It just looked like an indented style. That was probably why the empty field persisted.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Try setting it in a paragraph style as @jmlevy showed and not the bullet/numbering dialog box. 

You can just delete the tab and leave the current level code. 

[Thomas_Calvin]

Thanks. I have it all set up fine now. I just didn't know that pretty much every paragraph in my document was "numbered" with an invisible number.

[Willi Adelberger]

That is not true, only paragraphs with a numbering in the paragraph style has numbers.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

You can have a "hidden" number in a style, such as a heading to automatically re-start any list under them. 

[Willi Adelberger]

That is true. You can also havve a numbered paragraph without numbers to have any word or sentence as bullet, like "Phone numbeer:^t" which will repeat and need not to be typed again.

[Thomas_Calvin]

Yes it is true. And now I remember why it evolved in my document: So top-level numbers would reset to 1 if they were interrupted by a "normal" paragraph. To make this happen, I had to set up numbering for my "normal" text but leave the "Number" field empty. Here you can see that I activate numbering on a paragraph, but no number appears. But it changes the numbering that follows.