Outline Numbering Styles - help

mlbphd · December 30, 2021, 4:27pm

Hi Everyone,
Thank you for reading.I have just switched from the foldrums of MSWord to LO - word cannot handle my PhD dissertation. Not a newbie - big geek. Seeing benefits. However, I have dyslexia (go easy) and need pointed in the right direciton, PLEASE.

(update PS. If there is a legitimate frteelancer out there who can just help me with this I am VERY open to hiring someone. I need to be in theory - not formatting land! thanks).

Issue (pulling hair out): Outline Numbering, lists and TOC
Have scoured forums, watched legions of youtube tutorials. Advice seems to be either all-style related or all-lists. Something missing.
Problems:
Outline Numbering. All I want is pictured below. Simple as can be.
Steps:
-Created a Customed Style for each level and format prefs - Headers, Body Test, Quotes, etc.
-Based the “levels” approriately

issues:
When I get deep down in a document (I am dealing with 20,000 word chapters) The sequence Will just go out of sync. So Say I am now at main headr “3” which is Roman Numerals, followed by “A, B, C” etc…

If I restart the numbering on a page - it throws my outline…

                      **What I want:**

III. Chapter
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

A. Subhead
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

a). unstyled/non-outlined native formatted list of some kind
b). unstyled/non-outlined native formatted list of some kind
c). unstyled/non-outlined native formatted list of some kind

more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>
more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 1. Sub-Subhead
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

B. Subhead
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 1. Sub-Subhead
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 2. Sub-Subhead
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 3. Sub-Subhead
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

            **What I get - arbitrarily - for no reason. Also sometimes corrects itself when closing/ re-opening the file.:**

III. Chapter
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

A. Subhead
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

a). unstyled/non-outlined native formatted list of some kind
b). unstyled/non-outlined native formatted list of some kind
c). unstyled/non-outlined native formatted list of some kind

more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>
more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 1. Sub-Subhead
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

B. Subhead
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>
yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 **2.** Sub-Subhead (THIS!)
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 **3.** Sub-Subhead
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

 **4.** Sub-Subhead
     more yada yada <body copy text/paragraphs>

Can someone shed some light? I am no stranger to styles - was a typesetter in a past life - Quark/Indesign. However, this all seems like there’s two layers of counterintuitivity between the styles, and the outline sequencing.

All I want to do is type and roll - nothingg fancy at all.

Kind Thanks!

Martyn

ajlittoz · December 30, 2021, 5:17pm

First of all, there are built-in tools to handle the “outline”, i.e. the chapter structure of your document.

The tools are the Heading n family of paragraph styles and the dedicated numbering counter you control through Tools>Chapter Numbering.

DON’T MIX ANY OTHER “DECORATION” (like bullet or [manual] numbering) unless you absolutely want to create an unmanageable mess.

The Heading n styles flag the corresponding paragraph as being headings at levels 1 to 10. Level 1 will be “Chapter” for you, level 2 “Subhead”, level 3 “Sub-Subhead”.

Numbering must be enabled in Tools>Chapter Numbering where you decide which kind of “number” you want at each level (uppercase Roman at level 1, uppercase alphabetical at level 2, common digit at level 3, …).

Your “a). unstyled/non-outlined native formatted list of some kind” is called a numbered list and must not be formatted with Heading n otherwise it becomes part of the “outline”.

Lists can be formatting in two ways:

manually, which is more immediate (for M$ Word switchers because Word offers no other way) but complicates layout tuning in the end because it is direct formatting (the source of all evil in document formatting)

In this method, you press a numbering button in the toolbar when the cursor is in the to-be list item. The main problem is you can’t easily modify afterwards the lists and can’t make a difference between independent lists.
with styles, providing much more powerful formatting and consistent semantic markup

But this needs to understand the relationship between a paragraph style controlling the appearance of item text and a list style defining the properties of the counter and level indentation.

I recommend you practice a bit with the manual method before embarking with style-controlled lists, though it is the adequate method in a document like a thesis.

Golden rule: never mix list numbering and chapter (outline) numbering.

From your “What I get”, you apparently used a list for your “Sub-Subheads” instead of Heading 3.

TOC is another issue. If your outline is marked up with Heading n, Insert>TOC & Index>TOC, Index or Bibliography is all you need to build your TOC.

For more targeted advice, mention your OS name and LO version (there are subtle differences between releases, mainly in menu labels). Eventually, attach a sample fil with your “what I get” description.

mlbphd · December 30, 2021, 5:31pm

OMG. New best friend. I’m going through this, THANK YOU.

I’ve created an unmanageable mess.

Go > start over.

mlbphd · December 31, 2021, 4:13pm

Follow up.

So, I bit the bullet instead of my lip, and took the text from my document as unformatted text and started over. Less time than undoing a rat’s nest.

I followed this clear post to the letter, and all is well. Again, I thank you and am very grateful.

I’ve also decided to do a bare minimum formatting, keep the sturcture basic, and look for/hire a formatting pro when I am completed the manuscript turn it over to a pro to finalise - something I’ve learned the hard way, along the way.

Is there a suggesiton box for Libre? I love this project. This is what technology should be about, and how it should be handled. The fact that Libre incorporated Zotero (another open source, HUMAN bit of kit) speaks volumes. That said, I think the dev challenge here is the nomenclature - ‘styles’ is used in several places, and some simple clarification might help. Dunno - just tossing it out there. “Local” formatting" vs. "Style (dare I say ‘sheet’) formatting…?

Also: I would happily chip into a collection box for a rewrite of the ‘official’ insturctions…well intended, but daunting. Your example here is a good example of possibilities.

Again, Thank you for taking the time.

ajlittoz · December 31, 2021, 4:35pm

Thanks for the feed back, but this a Question & Answers site, not a forum. Consequently, this feed back should have been written as a comment because it is not another solution.

Regarding formatting “pros”, I’d like to make you well aware that very often these “pros” master the artistic touch of the job but very frequently do a nasty job because they don’t master at all LO Writer and its style machinery. They finally give you a book which is nice-looking but next to impossible to maintain because they resort to (manual) direct formatting. And this is precisely the kind of unmanageable mess I warned you against.

A good pro should be able to dramatically change the appearance in a matter of seconds. This can be done only if the document is fully styled. And this is your job as the author. Think that styling is first a semantic markup where you tag paragraphs, words, images, … with the value, importance or significance they have for you. Don’t care for the formatting attributes, this is a task for the “formatting pro”. But nobody else can do this semantic markup. If you don’t do it, your formatting pro will inevitably return a formatting mess because he can’t guess what was in author’s head.

Zotero is external to LO and IMHO not correctly integrated with LO, in fact not integrated at all. It is a “universal” product (compatible with LO, MS and other suites). Consequently, developers chose to implement their own “portable” solutions. This ends up in a set of macros and direct formatting which conflict with “pure” ODF structure, making formatting difficult to tune (no integration with the style machinery). Though Zotero is recommended here and there, I prefer to use LO built-in features for better integration even if their power might be a bit below Zotero.

EDIT 2022-01-01
If you hire a “formatting pro”, give him a list of all the styles in your document (paragraph, character, page, frame, list) and the context of use. Provide the hierarchical relationship between them, i.e. modifying such style will impact such other styles. Important side warning: never use the so-called table “styles” for your tables; the present implementation is known to break any user added styled formatting because they are in fact a set of macros which “repaint” the table with direct formatting on every update.

Require some rules from the “pro”:

must not add any style without first asking you with a good rationale (because this impacts the significance of the document)
must not use direct formatting, except some manual page breaks to force switching to another page style, list numbering reset – I don’t see other acceptable exceptions
ideally all styles (= the document formatting) should go into a template file so that changing the template for another one “magically” changes the appearance of the document, e.g. one for printing, one for e-book, … This may need some tweaking with extension Template Changer and removing “overriding” style definitions in the document.

You would check “pro”'s job by selecting the whole document content and Ctrl+M. If anything changes/breaks, then the “pro” didn’t follow the rules (and this also proves he doesn’t not master Writer).