Steve Salter

An important part of technical writing is numbering. You don’t have to look far in the Tech Com world to find frustration with an application’s ability to handle numbering – and if you’re using Word you know what I mean. (I’m using Word in my paid job…)

Flare is quite adept at numbering – when you know how. In this first of maybe many blogs I want to examine numbering using complex selectors and the style sheet.

It is quite simple to create an ordered list – one that numbers the items. (An unordered list is one that most of us refer to as “dot points”.)

Just type your list item and apply the numbering from Flare’s format toolbar.

But, what if you want 2 levels to your list?

That’s easy – the Flare Stylesheet Editor is set up to allow you to format the complex selector ol ol – the one that sets the style for the second level of numbering.

Here I’ve set my lower level to lower case alphabetical characters. And the result:

So far, so good. The Flare interface has allowed me to create 2 depths to my list. But wait, I want more!

You’d be right in guessing I need a complex selector ol ol ol. Trouble is, the Flare stylesheet editor doesn’t have it! We can overcome this limitation using our favourite text editor. Open the stylesheet and enter the following at the bottom (I’m using Notepad++):

You can either add the formatting for the third level in the text editor, or you can save the stylesheet and open it with Flare’s stylesheet editor to format the level you just created. I’m using lower case roman for my third level:

Once you have set up your stylesheet, you can control your numbered list using the indent button on a list item.