Writer: list numbering using diacritic letters?

[MrTuxMan]

Hi,
in Writer if I want to list a couple of points and use letters instead of numbers, the sequence goes alphabetically, but using the English alphabet, such as: a), b), c), d) etc.
Now in my language (Slovenian) a letter with a diacritic mark follows the letter c, so that the correctly ordered list would look like this: a), b), c), č), d) etc.

I don’t know how to modify the style of the numbering so that it will correspond to this pattern. If I go to Tools→Outline Numbering, I can only choose (under the Number tab) between different styles of numbering (1,2,3; a,b,c; etc.), however, I don’t know how to modify those styles as such so that they will follow the right sequence.
Does anyone have any clue how this can be done?
Thanks in advance and BR

MrTuxMan

[Lupp]

Would you, please, precisely make clear what you have and what you want?
Have: abcd, Want: something else - or vice versa?
(Is abolishing this stubborn way an option? The mess made up by uselessly overstretched expectations concerning “localization” is too big already. This is one world.)

[MrTuxMan]

I tried to make it pretty clear, but I can also put it in the form that you proposed:
I have: abcd…
I want: abcčd…

Just to clarify: I didn’t ask for a localization, just if there is a way that I can somehow manually edit the numbering styles that are on offer without having to rely on programming/editing the source code.

[RGB-es]

Not possible, sorry:

Bug 32359 - Collation in lists doesn’t take into account language-specific letters (Ñ for Spanish, ÅÄÖ for Swedish,…)

[Lupp]

Shouldn’t the Royal Spanish Academy learn better? They surely are capable of.
This kind of stubbornness can only be handled correctly by crazy software no longer usable for a real (not royal) purpose.
BTW: Catalan nationalists deny the existence of a Spanish language. They tend to suppose you may have meant Castilian.

[MrTuxMan]

That’s a shame, I hope the developers will be able to implement this feature soon. Right know, quoting from formal documents that list items in accordance with the national syntax can be quite a challenging affair from a formatting point of view.

Thank you for your answer!

[petermau]

Actually, it may be possible using CUSTOMISE > USER ENTRY if I have understood the problem.

For example F11 > STYLES AND FORMATTING > LIST STYLES, select say (my example is English language) > LIST 1 > right click MODIFY. Then ORGANISER Level (1 in this example) CUSTOMISE, then select NUMBER > NONE then CHARACTER STYLE > USER ENTRY.

Then you can choose your own user characters. For example, in French a á à c ç e é ê etc. Sorry, don’t have a Slovenian keyboard to give that example. You can mix letters, numbers, symbols etc. to your hearts content.
You can also modify other levels to meet your own needs. Hope this gives a little help…Peter

---

This does mean that you will need to provide your own sequence characters, but this provides a language independent partial solution. As LibreOffice uses Unicode, this Unicode sequence would actually be independent of language.

[ajlittoz]

This won’t give auto-incrementation as requested by OQ: you just replace a bullet symbol by a fixed level-associated letter. Unless I missed the feature, you can’t define a sequence inside which LO will cycle when composing the “list”.

[mikekaganski]

Not a solution; and not to be taken as an opinion that this is not a sensible request. But I felt like sharing some thoughts on this.

The requested numbering style (essentially, language-specific numbering, i.e. that depends on list language) may have following problem: if document is translated, the numbering would change, and loose its number-to-content relation (one couldn’t write “see pt. č” to a correspondent with translated text). This could even go unnoticed, if the language was not set explicitly, but inherit from document language. So, this kind of numbering must be treated with precautions. This will inevitably lead to problems with some users (but any option makes problems with users that cannot use them properly).

The language would need to be applied to list style as a whole, because some parts of text in list may have different languages, and so there’s no way to figure the list language from its content.

Another thing is that there’s no one rule that will fit all. In some native-numbered lists, all letters are used; in other, some characters will be ruled out. This may be regulated on different levels of standardization (national, company, …).

So, IMO simply better solution would be to allow for used-defined set of “numbers” coupled with rules how to construct following levels (like aa, ab…). This wouldn’t depend on a language, and would be flexible enough (for price of more work needed to define it).

[ajlittoz]

A comment on “see point ê”: this should always be given through a cross-reference (you can select from a plentiful of sources, like page, chapter number, chapter title, note reference, etc.) to avoid the noted translation problem. It also avoid the problem of renumbering when the list is shuffled.

I admit that the present solution, though incomplete for some user needs, seems to be the “least bad” one and seems to look like what you describe in your last paragraph.