Hello,

I had another thought about list styles and I am planning a major
change which I would like to explain here. The trigger was chapter 11
(mail merge) of the Writer guide which contains many nested lists.

Numbered lists
----------------------
at present we have only one list style (OOoNumbering) which uses three
different numbering schemes:
level 1: Arabic number (right aligned)
level 2: small case letters (left aligned)
level 3: Roman number (left aligned)

We also have three paragraph styles families OOoNumbered 1,
OOoNumbered 2 and OOoNumbered 3.
In theory we should then use
OOoNumbered 1 for the first level of the list,
OOoNumbered 2 for the second level of the list
OOoNumbered 3 for the third level of the list.

However, since the underlying list style is the same, we do not need
three paragraph styles (in fact I never needed to use OOoNumbered 2
even for nested lists) and it is not possible, for example to create a
numbered list where the first level is, say letters and the second
level arabic numbers.

So my proposal is to define three *list* styles:
OOoNumbering 1 (all levels use Arabic numbering)
OOoNumbering 2 (all levels use small case letters)
OOoNumbering 3 (all levels use Roman numbers)

Once this is done, the paragraph styles will be changed so that:
OOoNumbered 1 (start, cont., end) are associated with OOoNumbering 1
OOoNumbered 2 (start, cont., end) are associated with OOoNumbering 2
OOoNumbered 3 (start, cont., end) are associated with OOoNumbering 3

In practical terms this means that when I want a certain numbering
type (arabic, letter, roman) I only need to to apply the corresponding
OOoNumbered paragraph style, then adjust the level as appropriate.


Bullet lists
---------------
Along the same lines, my proposal is to define
OOoBullet 1 (using round markers)
OOoBullet 2 (using dash markers)

And create a new family of paragraph styles OOoList 2 (start, cont.,
end) associated with OOoBullet 2

This allows, for example, to have round markers as level 2 (at present
as soon as you demote a bullet list to level 2 the marker
automatically becomes a dash.


I could not get my hands on the ODF specifications, but I am almost
sure that this is how lists are meant to work.

Cheers,

Michele

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