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Custom Clause Numbering

Match your Clause Numbering to your Precedent with ease

Claudia King avatar
Written by Claudia King
Updated over 5 years ago

No longer do you have to reach out to us when you want a new Numbering format for your Sections (Clauses).  Just use a Special Token to start a new list and define exactly how you want it to appear.

Note: this is a reasonably advanced feature that requires attention to tiny details.  We will soon replace this and other Special Tokens to be new Point Types for your convenience.

For your first try we will keep it simple - let's do a Background section that goes 2 levels deep, where we want items to be indicated by upper case letters with braces around each and sub-items numbered and followed by a dot, something like:

(A)
       1.
       2.
       3.
(B)
       1.
       2.
(C)
       1.
       2.
       3.


Like most Special Tokens, you need to make a Paragraph Point and put this in the Body:

<<<RESET||>>>

Now stick your cursor between the two pipes.  Pipes are vertical lines that look like this: ||||

Now type...

upperLetter,(%1)

...so that it looks like

<<<RESET|upperLetter,(%1)|>>>

If we stopped here, we would get (A), (B), (C) but we wouldn't get 1. 2. 3. under them.  To add that next level of depth, we add another pipe | like this:

<<<RESET|upperLetter,(%1)||>>>

and we put our cursor between the two pipes and type...

decimal,%2.

... so that it looks like:

<<<RESET|upperLetter,(%1)|decimal,%2.|>>>

That's it!  We are done.  We have both levels of depth formatted.

Before I show you one more cool feature we can use, let's look at what we have put on either side of each of the commas, starting with:

upperLetter,(%1)

The left side sets how the counters display, and has just a few self-explanatory options:  

upperLetter
lowerLetter
upperRoman
lowerRoman
decimal
decimalEnclosedCircle

The right side is a bit trickier, so let's ignore the braces ( ) and look at the %1 part.  Think of these as placeholders for the counter of whichever type selected above - the %1 represents the upper case letter that we are going to get, and since we want it wrapped with braces we put those around the %1 to get (A) (B) (C) etc.

The next depth is "decimal" because we want a number, and since we want a dot after it we put:

%2.

That gives us the 1. 2. 3. etc.  But what if we wanted to combine them?  Another common pattern is as follows:

<<<RESET|decimal,%1.|decimal,%1.%2|>>>

The first level of depth will look familiar from the previous examples, but the second level of depth shows us that we have the ability to include higher levels as well.  In this example, under 1. we will see 1.1 then 1.2 then 1.3 etc.  Note that if we left out the %1 part, we would get .1 then .2 then .3 etc.

By continuing this pattern you can support 5 levels of custom numbering.  But wait, there's more!

By adding another pipe at the end and including a Font name, the numbering will appear in that Font:

<<<RESET|decimal,%1.|decimal,%1.%2|Times New Roman|>>>

Just make sure that in this case (and in all cases where you select fonts) that the font is available on the device opening the Word output.  When in doubt, check the dropdown list in any Theme to see what we consider to be safe options.

One last special case - there is another display option for numbering levels called "none".  This is for special cases where you don't actually want anything to appear to the left of the text.  Let's say we want the third level not to have numbers, so we use "none" and supply a blank after the first comma like this:

<<<RESET|decimal,%1.|decimal,%1.%2|none,|Times New Roman|>>>

Happy numbering!

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