Numbered list generator in nine styles

Paste the lines into the box above and the numbers appear immediately, one per line, in the style you pick. Nothing needs to be installed, and the result is ordinary text rather than a word-processor list, so it survives being pasted into a form, an email, a chat message or a spreadsheet cell. Start at, step and leading zeros let you match a numbering scheme you have to fit into rather than starting from 1 every time.

Yes, because they are real characters rather than a list style — but Word may try to take them over. Its AutoFormat feature spots a line beginning "1. " and converts your typed numbers into an automatic list of its own, hiding the ones you pasted and renumbering the rest to suit itself. If that happens, undo once immediately (Ctrl+Z reverses the autoformat but keeps the paste), or paste with Ctrl+Shift+V as unformatted text, or turn off Automatic numbered lists under AutoCorrect Options. Google Docs behaves the same way and offers the same escape.

Because a computer sorting plain text puts 10 before 2, and a zero in front fixes it. Anything that sorts your lines alphabetically — a file browser, a spreadsheet column, a shared drive — reads the number as characters rather than as a value, so 1, 10, 11, 2, 3 is the correct alphabetical answer to a question nobody meant to ask. Padding to a fixed width makes the character order and the numeric order agree. Two digits carry you to 99 and three to 999, and the automatic setting looks at how long your list actually is and pads to fit.

Yes — after a list is numbered, the button beside Copy shows the number the next batch should begin at and sets the start field to it. That is how you number a long document in sections without counting by hand: number the first eighty lines, hit the button, paste the next block and it picks up at 81. The same trick works with Roman numerals and letters, where it reports the next label rather than the next digit.

Set the step field to 2 and the markers run 1, 3, 5, 7 — useful for interleaved scripts, exam papers with alternating answer slots and seating rows. Steps up to 1,000 are allowed, so a list can be numbered in tens or hundreds. Numbering only some of your lines is a different matter: set the blank-line menu to leave blanks unnumbered and the count skips over them while continuing to rise, which is how to keep headings inside a numbered list without giving them numbers of their own.

To MMMCMXCIX, which is 3,999 — beyond that the numerals fall back to ordinary digits, because the classical system has no repeatable way to write four thousand. They are written in the subtractive form, so 4 is IV and 900 is CM rather than IIII and DCCCC. Both cases are available: capitals for outline headings, lower case for the front matter of a book, where prefaces and contents pages have been numbered i, ii, iii for centuries so that the body can start at page 1 no matter how much introduction gets added later.

They are replaced, unless you untick the box that says so. It knows decimal numbers, Roman numerals in either case and single letters, bracketed or bare, padded or not, and it strips the old marker before adding the new one — which is what makes it useful for repairing a list that has been reordered by hand. Untick the box and your new markers are added in front of the old ones instead, which is occasionally what a nested outline needs.