Allow for Non-Numbered Items in Numbered Lists

🌟Features
#1

I would love to be able to have non-numbered items in a numbered list that don’t affect the count. This would be super useful for drafting finalized numbered lists where something with a number is “finalized” and a bullet is an idea, option, or information holder.

So for example, if I could create a mixed list then I could draft a section to include chapter “ideas” without throwing off my chapter count:

() Section overview
1 - Chapter 1
2 - Chapter 2
() Chapter idea that might fit in here
3 - Chapter 3
() Question that needs to be answered before the next chapter
4 - Chapter 4

But the way it works now, I need to either

  1. use regular bullets and constantly update my numbered list if I move things around or put any additional information in (which is annoying if the number of items is important to keep track of)

  2. put any additional information I want in the numbered list at the bottom which throws off my ability to easily see where the content might go in the first place.

Potential solution: Allow for the toggle between bullet and number to happen on a item by item basis.

(Dynalist is the best Windows outliner I’ve ever used and I’ve used almost all of them - thank you)

EDIT: had to adjust things to make my example list appear correctly

6 Likes
#2

Thanks for the request! I understand that you encounter this need when writing the book.

I played with Microsoft Word to see if I can accomplish the same thing in Word, and surprisingly I didn’t find a way to do it. Do you know if it’s possible to do it in Word?

Not saying we’re 100% not going to add this if Word doesn’t have it, but considering the one million features Word has for editing text, if this isn’t one of them, there’s a good chance it’s very niche.

Thanks in advance!

#3

No, I can’t seem to figure out how to do it in Word. But the reason I love Dynalist is because it ISN’T Word. Word is perfect for publishing polished & well structured documents.

Dynalist is perfect for the messy process of content creation. I think adding flexibility to one of the core features of Dynalist (numbered vs ordered lists) would only make it better - but I can acknowledge I’m a bit biased :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

This would be incredibly useful!

To add a thought in this issue: I believe Word doesn’t need to have this feature because making lists is not the core primary purpose of Word. List making in Word are just an add on possibility in much extended context of a rich-text writing app.

As I don’t think anyone would write long form writing in Dynalist, I wouldn’t go to Word to make complex lists inside of lists and easily manage each of those rich nestable lists and nodes.
I would go directly to Dynalist for such a job. And Dynalist main purposes is, indeed, to manage complex quantities of lists, with different kind of content and children lists of lists, and so on and so forth. So, I do believe it would make a lot of sense, for Dynalist to offer a powerful way of customizing the way lists works, and how the information on lists are shown.

Starting a list from 0 or any other number chosen by the user would be a list manager super power for instance!

Having numbered lists displayed in monospace characters to be perfectly aligned would be another great add. As aligning monospaced numbers to the decimal unit, etc.