The speedy remedy is much appreciated. Plus you gave options.

I’m presuming that option 2 — your invisible paragraph — might cause fewer problems when generating the TOC because I’ll be able to skip it altogether.

But will that ghost paragraph cause more problems (than option 1) when making the ePub?

Again, thank you.

I absolutely got your point. And I could see/guess ‘why’ the behaviour occurs in inDesign. I do appreciate the effort you’ve made to explain why this is an error, but I should have pointed out this isn’t my content. Like many here, my job is layout.

I’m posting to this forum for 2 reasons:

First, the numbering ‘accurately’ skips a level in the Word file my client supplied. In the real document, a Level 4 subhead is skipped so the list is jumping from Level 3 to Level 5. Semantically, this jump is NOT AN ERROR because the “level of importance” is logically consistent with similar subheads in other chapters/lists. I can’t therefore suggest my client edit the copy and promote Level 5 subheads to Level 4 just so that the listing they were able to accomplish in Word can be reproduced/maintained in the software I decided to use for page layout. At the same time, experience makes me fearful of taking a shortcut to manually number subheads in such a long and complex manual (with TOC and ePub coming further down the road).

Second, the “Any Previous Level” setting in the Paragraph Styles dialog promises to do what Word managed automatically. And that is all I want/expect it to do. It doesn’t say “The Previous Level” or “One Previous Level” so, taken literally, it seems to be an error—on my part or Adobe’s.

TL:DR The list skipping a level is not a proofreading error; the client made it work in Word; I can’t shift the list up one level or create an intermediate level subhead (just) to satisfy inDesign; and numbering this subhead manually will cause trouble down the road. I’m therefore stuck in a position I assume others before me have been in and I’m begging for help with a deadline looming.

Help!