Hi,

I can confirm this, having tried to reproduce what you wanted to do after I saw the posting on the users list. I haven't played with the styles to see whether the objective can be attained through the clever use of styles though, but it does seem that the automatic numbering function used for list numbering prevents the user from defining the numbering in the way you indicate. I can also confirm that this kind of numbering is very common in legal instruments.


More of a feature request than a bug though.

Alex

I can't create what is required in styles. A special tag (i.e. {L} for level, or {PL} for previous level) could enable this feature if placed in the "Before" field or if there was a tick box to force numbering on position (i.e. so iV and D both number as 4). 
I think more of a feature request than a bug.

Tested again in LO 3.5.5 Beta2.  With the same results.  Essentially this is a feature request for more advanced list numbering that is very useful for attorneys or those that must format section/paragraph/outline numbering in certain ways because of legal requirements or because of standard style.  Sorry for testing so late.  I can provide more examples.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Tested again in LO 3.5.5 Beta2.  With the same results.  Essentially this is a
> feature request for more advanced list numbering that is very useful for
> attorneys or those that must format section/paragraph/outline numbering in
> certain ways because of legal requirements or because of standard style.  Sorry
> for testing so late.  I can provide more examples.

Whoops 3.5.0 Beta2 I tested it in the future.

Problem (lack of feature) still exists in version 3.5.3.2 (Release). I am pretty sure I should have changed this to new after I tested back in December, so Doing that as well

While I find this rather important, I edited https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office#General_office_suite:_LibreOffice_vs._Microsoft_Office and added Complex Outline numbering / Multilevel list.
I marked LO support as partial.

To document a simpler but related case in legal documents, consider the following as may be used in a US District Court pleading where all paragraphs must be consecutively numbered:

  1.  Introductory paragraph.
  2.  Introductory paragraph.
A. FIRST SECTION HEADING
  3.  Paragraph in first section.
  4.  Paragraph in first section.
         Specially formatted, un-numbered blockquote citation.
         Specially formatted, un-numbered blockquote citation.
  5.  Paragraph in first section.
B. NEXT SECTION HEADING
  6.  Paragraph in next section.

Conceptually, headings belong at a 'higher' level than the body text paragraphs, but I couldn't trick Tools->Outline Numbering in 4.1.2.3 to:
- Allow "A." to occur in the 1st level when 2nd level paragraphs already existed;
- Give consecutive numbering in the 2nd level only;
- Avoid prepending the numbering divider "." to paragraphs of 1st or 2nd outline style when numbering is turned off (as one might do to quickly direct-format blockquotes without defining a new style).

This can be worked around by using a "Paragraphs" list and a "Headings" list, but that loses rapid raise/demote and incurs some annoyance-grade chicken and egg problems (make a heading a member of the Headings list - then apply Heading 1 format - now go back and make it a member of the list again because numbering got turned off).

Use of capital letters for headings in the example is arbitrary, could be Roman or anything else.

Still present in Version: 4.1.3.2
Build ID: 70feb7d99726f064edab4605a8ab840c50ec57a - Sophie

please give an update about the bug status with current 4.2.4.2 LibO release.

if bug is still here, please move it from mab4.1 list to mab4.2 since 4.1.x reached END OF LIFE

From reading this - I'm convinced that it's an enhancement request. It's a missing feature in LibreOffice - not something that exists but is broken (by definition an enhancement request) 

Marking as such and removing from MAB list - it does not belong there.

This entire bug needs clarification. Legal document the world over are reknown for using highly specific styling that often break every other convention used. The examples in comment 0 and comment 8 are explicitly NOT outline numbering, which as the name suggests indicates exact position in a document. By all means implement a new numbering scheme but label it "legal" or something similar, rather than outline.

Can confirm that this feature is still missing and is prohibiting the adoption of LibreOffice in my line of work (Engineering). We need to have numbered headings and subparagraphs (with different paragraph styles possible for each level of numbering and indentation) for requirements.

Changing priority back to 'medium' since the number of duplicates is lower than 5

Comment 13 points out that this bug report is not focused.

Have rewritten the summary to make a focus on the first of two problems that were identified in the original report.

The technical problem behind the summary:  Consider a document with two outline levels, expressed respectively in paragraph styles: Heading 1 and Heading 2.

Heading 1 is numbered with Roman numerals.

I.  Heading 1

The next outline level (the child) is currently "forced" to use the numbering style of the parent level.  Say that Heading 2 is numbered with Arabic numbers.  At present, it would appear as:

I.1  Heading 2

The enhancement request is to allow the child (in this case the style Heading 2) to take the parent's numerical value (where in this example, the value is "1"), and allow Heading 2 to decide the style of expression for this numerical value. For example.

1.1  Heading 2    or  A.1 Heading 2

I could not find other bug reports that expressed this particular problem, which is expressed clearly here (and which others have noted as a problem).  

The second problem raised in the original report (about "leading zeros") is similar to bug 62654, which is noted in See Also.

Created attachment 195277 [details]
new "All sublevels Arabic" option in "Bullets and Numbering"

#150408 is possibly related to this. A new option "All sublevels Arabic" was added to the "Bullets and Numbering" dialog. Seems that this would allow at least some of the use cases described here.

In my own (quick) testing, this is still not available for heading styles, only for lists. And some use cases still don't work.

E.g.:

A
A.IV
1.4.1

works fine.
But I see no way to do something like:

A
1.IV
1.4.a

Admittedly, this last example is probably ridiculous. It's just meant as a showcase, what a truly flexible numbering system could do. If it can do that, it should be able to cover almost any thinkable use case.