Alternatives to numbered headings?

[Geoff Hart <Geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Joanne Grey is <<... producing two rather large docs... that
will be translated into multiple languages... management
wants to move to a numbered heading system... Heading 1 is
"Section 1", heading 2s are "Section 1.1" heading threes are
"Section 1.1.1" and so on. The doc manager would like to
avoid this for aesthetic reasons.>>

I actively dislike numbered heading systems, but not for
"aesthetic reasons" (which is a fairly weak justification); my
problem with them is that they're often a substitute for
spending some skull sweat coming up with an effective
document structure. (I suspect I was scared by a lawyer when
I was an infant, and ever since, have had an aversion to
numbered documents. <g>) In effect, document structure
should be as close to obvious as possible, and shouldn't rely
on numbers to make the structure evident to the reader; with
only three levels of heading, numbering is probably
unnecessary. Furthermore, I have a strong (but unconfirmed
from experimental evidence) suspicion that numbers also
scare certain users, since they imply a complexity (e.g., as in
legal documents and government regulations) that really isn't
present in typical tech-comm documents. And if the reader
starts out scared of the documentation...

That being said, there are two very good arguments in favor
of numbered structures. First, some types of document are
quite complex, and developing an un-numbered structure
may demand such literary convolutions that the lack of
numbers represents no improvement; in some cases, the task
may even be impossible, though I wouldn't give up on trying
to eliminate the numbers without a fight. Second, numbered
sections can be a godsend to readers when there are many
(and I have no idea of the cutoff point) sections on a page
and you're referring readers to that page via a cross-reference;
in that case, saying "see section 1.1.1.1" is much more helpful
than writing "it's somewhere on page 300; you figure out
where". Think of a dictionary as an example of this: when a
dictionary entry refers you to a synonym, they do so by name
(editing: see also text vivisection) rather than simply referring
you to the page on which the synonym occurs.

In your specific situation, it's pretty hard to speculate whether
the numbers are actually necessary without seeing an
example of your document structure. Why not send us a
sample so we have something to chew on?

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}     Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"The text's out of joint, oh cursed spite/that I was born to set it
right."--Prince Hamlet, early Danish editor

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