OT: autonumbering in Word

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Fri, 19 May 2006 17:21:46 -0400, "Fred Ridder" <docudoc at hotmail.com> wrote:

>>From: Stuart Rogers <srogers at phoenix-geophysics.com>
>
>>Regrettably, Jon, it sounds from McGhie's explanation that even your 
>>exhaustively careful preparation of numbering will not immunize you from 
>>all risks of numbering disaster. Apparently all you have to do is copy some 
>>numbered (or just bulleted!) content from another document and paste it 
>>into yours...

That's pretty broken, all right...

>In my experience with Word, the only truly reliable way to handle
>numbering in Word is to avoid the autonumber feature altogether
>and instead roll your own with the SEQ field code, which you
>wind up using in a way that is fundamentally pretty similar to
>FrameMaker's paragraph numbering except that you have to
>assign a name to each individual digit's counter rather than being
>able to name a complete multi-digit series as in Frame.

Yes, I agree.  That's the method we use in Mif2Go to make
"live" autonumbers in Word docs, based on the Frame counters.
The drawback WRT maintenance in Word is that you have to
copy the SEQ fields from another para of the same type, or 
painfully recreate them by hand, for new paras; you can't
include SEQ fields (or bullets) in the para format as such.

This leads to the best workaround of all: use Frame, and
generate the Word version on demand.  ;-)  We have several
customers who do exactly that.  It's even possible to do
it in what used to be an all-Word shop.  After all, if
they get working Word files, why do they care *how* they
were created?  <vbg>

>Unfortunately, since bullets use the same mechanism in Word, you
>still have to live with bizarre behavior in that feature...

Unless you use Frame/Mif2Go as your Word authoring tool...

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/