How do I restart a numbered list?

Question

Hello all,
First of all, I have to say, I can't believe how long it is taking me to set up my project. It seems like the most basic functionality in FM does not translate easily to RH. The lack of documentation around TCS3 Frame to Robohelp linking is simply unbelievable. Am I the only one who is frustrated and missing deadlines because of this?
Anyway, I have encountered another problem with numbered lists.
My list consists of two Framemaker paragraph tags. One that sets the counter back to 1 (used for the first item in a list), and then another tag for list items 2 and onwards.
Here is the problem:
I am using the Multilevel lists feature to set up my lists, which, for the most part works fine.
The only problem I am encountering is this:
when I have two lists within the same topic, I cannot get the second list to restart at 1!  Has anyone been able to figure this out with the multilevel lists?
I know I can manually reset the counter from within Robohelp, but that defeats the purpose of linking my FrameMaker document. I cannot go and find all my lists in Robohelp and restart the numbering there. There has to be an automated way to do this.
Any ideas?
thanks.
Sue

Answer 1

Jeff:
I wonder if you had any luck creating a style that starts at one and mapping to it? I tried to do something similar, but ultimately came up against all the same problems I've been experiencing from the beginning linking FM>RH with numbered lists.
If you map to a single Paragraph and associated Multilevel List Style, you get this:
Heading 1
1.
2.
3.
Heading 2
4.
5.
6.
I thought I would be clever and try to duplicate the method for restarting numbered lists in FM (two styles, the initial number with style and <n=1> and subsequent number mapped to one style using <n+>.
I created two RH Paragraph Styles to map over. For each Paragraph Style, I used Autonumber, Create/Edit Custom Sequence to try to mimic this numbering sequence. The first style starts and one, and that works fine. But you run into the same problem when you create the second Autonumber list that starts at 2:
Heading 1
1.
2.
3.
Heading 2
1.
4.
5.
To be more clear, this is only a problem when you have more than one numbered list on the same page using the same numbering style.
This is a huge problem for those linking FM files in RH. Leaving the style as "source" in the mapping is unacceptable. For me it trails off the left side of the page and you cannot even see the number.
The only thing that comes close to a workaround is "convert to text." But the formatting is just terrible. There is no way to control the indentation between the number and the beginning text in the list. Since all of our documentation is task-oriented, with numbered steps, suddenly this shortcoming has just doomed all of our documentation to a terribly sloppy and unprofessional aesthetic.
If anyone has any other insights regarding how this could work, please contact me.
Thanks,
Douglas