Writer Guide

Working with list styles
List styles (also called numbering styles) work together with paragraph
styles. They define indentation, alignment, and the numbering or bullet
characters used for list items. You can define many list styles, from
simple bulleted lists to complex multi-level (nested) lists.
As with other styles, the main reasons for using list styles are
consistency and speeding up your work. Although you can create
simple lists quickly by clicking the Numbering On/Off or Bullets
On/Off icons on the Formatting toolbar, and create quite complex
nested lists using the icons on the Bullets and Numbering toolbar, the
appearance of the resulting lists may not be what you want—and you
might want to have more than one style of list. You can use the Bullets
and Numbering choice on the Format menu to manually format the
appearance of some or all of the lists, but if you later need to change
their appearance, you will have a lot of manual work to do.
Note
OOo uses the terms “numbering style” and “list style”
inconsistently, but they are the same thing. For example, the
tooltip in the Styles and Formatting window says “List Styles”,
but its style dialog box says “Numbering Style”.
Defining the appearance of a nested list
A nested list is a numbered or bulleted list with subordinate (usually
indented) numbered or bulleted lists. Rather than just a list of
numbered items (1,2,3...), a nested list may have item 1, then indented
items numbered a,b,c or i,ii,iii or some other numbering method before
the main number 2. With numbering styles, you can achieve any
combination of numbering formats you want. A nested list may even
combine numbered items with bulleted items.
There is no difference between defining a nested list style or a simple
list, although nested lists require more work. An example of a nested
list is given in Chapter 3 (Working with Text). In that case, the list was
built using one of the predefined outline schemes as a starting point,
while in this section we follow a more general approach so that the list
can fully suit your needs.
Chapter 7 Working with Styles 259
Free eBook Edition