Managing Tips Between Numbered Lists

David Blatner

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So you have a numbered list, but you want to insert tips (or some other kind of paragraph) between the numbered paragraphs. That’s easy to do: Just turn off the automatic numbers for those paragraphs. But what if you’re using that cool trick where you actually use automatic numbers for your tips? Here’s an example:

Those “TIP”s are all set up with a custom automatic numbering system in the paragraph style definition:

In other words, we don’t have to type “tip” over and over; we just assign the paragraph style and it gets that styling automatically. But as you can see, the numbered list gets all messed up — resetting back to 1 after each tip.

One solution is to select each of those paragraphs (the ones that follow the tip), Option/Alt-click the Numbered List button in the Control panel (which opens the Bullets and Numbering dialog box), changing the Mode popup menu to Start At, and finally manually setting the start number to what it should be.

But you know there’s got to be a better way, right?

Right. Here’s the trick: Edit the paragraph style definition for the Tip style by changing the Level field to 2.

The result? It looks like this:

Perfect! This might seem strange, but think about it this way: Consider if the “tip” numbered list was set up as, say, lower case letters (a, b, c). By setting the Level to 2, you’d get “1, 1a, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 4, 5, etc.” That kind of makes sense, right?

Anyway, using that “level 2” trick can save you a lot of time!