Fixing Chapter Numbering – a tip

This was going to be a question, but I stumbled on the answer. It might bite others so I thought I’d pass it along as a tip.

Apparently I’d forgotten how to do chapter numbering in books; happily I re-discovered the trick. I’ve done dozen of books with numbered chapters, but it failed this time.

For the new project, I have a book document with four files. The first is the front matter; the other three are intended to be chapters.

Each chapter document begins with a paragraph style called ‘ChapterTitle’ and it is set to be numbered, with a number-list named ChapNums. Its Mode is set to ‘Continue from Previous’.

It didn’t work. I carefully made sure I sync’d paragraph styles across the book, no help. I googled here and elsewhere for suggestions and trued them. No luck.

Then I discovered that most of the chapters were not set to use the number-list ChapNums. When I sync’d the book, I did not specify syncing numbered list as well as paragraph styles, etc. When I sync’d the list and renumbered, all was well.

I hope this is useful to someone. I don’t like to “shotgun” sync everything; if you weren’t careful about where you last changed something and then moved the master doc, you blow away your changes.