Automatic numbering customization for legal documents
Dear Sir or Madam,
for some time now German law students have tried to work around a problem that is common to all major word processing software: it is not possible to use the auto numbering and, thus, the automatic creation of a table of contents because it is not possible to customize the structuring.
Most German lawyers have adopted a convention which runs as follows:
A., B., C. ....
I., II., III., .....
1., 2., 3., .....
a), b), c), .....
aa), bb), cc), ....
(1), (2), (3), ......
alpha), beta), gamma), .... (greek symbols).
Especially level 5 ( aa), bb), ....) and level 7 can not be incorporated.
Whilst this may sound trivial to most, there are thousands of law students (who are mainly concerned with this problem), but also professionals who ground their teeth over this because they have to hard format their large documents - and spend a couple of hours creating the table of contents and double-checking the numbering is correct.
It doesn't matter if this feature becomes a real part of the software or if someone who has a bit more of a clue than a mere lawyer creates some sort of macro or script. But if this issue was solved, StarOffice could become in Germany what WordPerfect was in the US: a standard software for the legal area.
Generally, the possibility to obbey conventions is more essential to most people than to count words within tables, I think. In this context I refer to the topic concerning accounting numbering in calc in this forum.
I hope I could draw your attention to this very widespread problem,
thank you for your attention,
Christian Franz
