Forcing numbered lists to always restart in a master document

[Carrbigdog]

I am creating a long document as a master. I have used the same template to create the master and sub-documents in order to force font usage with an embedded font and identical styles. When I copy in one of the sub-documents, one of the ordered lists does not restart numbering. When I edit the sub-document everything appears fine, the list starts with the letter ‘a.’, but copied into the master, the list starts with the letter ‘i.’ and continues incrementing from there. Can anyone point me somewhere to check what might be wrong?
Or is there a global option that I have not found to cause lists to always restart numbering.

Thanks

[ajlittoz]

Sub-documents are interpreted differently when they are considered alone or as part of a master document.

Alone, they behave as usual.

When part of a master (what do you mean by “copied into the master”? Pasting with Ctrl+V? Listed as a sub-document?), the master and its sub-docs make a single text flow. As such, all lists constitute a single sequence over the synthetic document.

As example consider the headings: they are numbered monotonously without restart.

To understand how to manage them, it is necessary to define what a logical list is. A list is composed of all paragraphs associated with the same list style. Consequently if the same list style is used in several sub-documents, the paragraphs will part of a unique list albeit spread over several document and the numbering will be continuous across them.

Well, as always, there is a huge exception. If you number the items with Format>Bullets & Numbering or equivalently with the toolbar buttons, the preceding definition doesn’t apply because this is a direct formatting offered as a quick’n’dirty courtesy compatibility way with M$ Word. It isn’t really deterministic and depends on the writing history of the document (individual file). It may or may not create independent lists. Since this looks random to newbies, I recommend not using the toolbar buttons and make the effort to learn how to use list styles although this is a feature difficult to master.

How to restart list numbering?

Unfortunately, there is no setting in paragraph styles to do this. I’d like to have a paragraph style for the initial item in a list, another one for the running items and yet another one for the last item. Although this scheme works for “geometric” attributes like spacing above and below, it is of no help where numbering is concerned.

Restart numbering must be manually done as:

• put the cursor in the item to become the new starting point
• Format>Lists>Restart Numbering to flag the item

If you insert a new item before the restarted one, don’t forget to remove the flag with the same menu command.