I tried to follow the directions on autonumbering cells in a Mathematica-8 notebook, here
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/AutomaticNumbering.html
I created a tiny notebook with four text cells
foo
qux
blancmange
bar
Placing the cursor just before foo
, I then used the Insert
menu, Automatic numbering
item, giving me the Create Automatic Numbering Object
dialog box. I chose in the Counter
dropdown then item Text
, clicked This counter object
radio button, and Huzzah! got the number 1 just before foo
, presumably referring to the first cell of type Text
in the notebook. I now see
1foo
qux
blancmange
bar
and I insert my own dot space
after the 1 to get a nice-looking
1. foo
qux
blancmange
bar
I do likewise with bar
and see the expected
1. foo
qux
blancmange
4. bar
because bar
is the fourth cell of type Text
. Great. Now I want to create an independent numbering system for cells qux
and blancmange
. I use Cell
menu, Cell Tags...
, Add/Remove Cell tags...
item and put the tag test
on cells qux
and blancmange
. I use Cell
menu, Cell Tags...
, Show cell tags
item to make sure they're there, and, sure enough, they show up in the notebook (I won't attempt to mimic the display, here, but there is a link to my notebook in a Dropbox public folder at the bottom of this question if you want to have a look). I then position the cursor before qux
and use Insert
menu, Automatic numbering
item, this time choosing Use the counter value corresponding to the location of:
, then The first cell with the tag:
, then test
, my user-created tag, go OK, and i get a ZERO! ditto before blancmange
. My final (bad) result, after putting a little lipstick on the pig with my own dot
and space
, looks like
1. foo
0. qux
0. blancmange
4. bar
If try referring to a non-existent tag, I get
1. foo
XXXqux
XXXblancmange
4. bar
so Mathematica recognized something, but not what I expected or needed.
I also need to say that I tried the Item Numbered
item in the Format
item, but I have two problems with it: (1) I don't know how to RESTART the numbering from 1, so every block of Item Numbered
cells belongs to the same sequence of numbered items. I get 1, 2, 3, here, then 4, 5, 6, later, and 7, 8, 9, even later, etc. I really need independently numbered blocks of items: 1, 2, 3 here, 1, 2, 3 later, and 1, 2, 3 even later, etc. (2) I need to number various different kinds of cells, so I really need to create my own tags and control my tracking of them.
I will be very grateful for any advice.
Here's a link to my trivial little notebook.
I think you are trying to use cell tags in the wrong way
(and I just noticed that you said as much in a comment above)!
The counters only count how many cells of a certain style have already occurred (although the counters can be automatically or manually reset/changed). The cell tags are so that you can refer to a specific cell later on, such as a specific equation or code block etc...
At the moment, your cells tagged "test" us the following counter
CounterBox["Code", "test"]
. This counter will look for the first code style cell tagged with "test" and print its number. Since you have no code blocks tagged "test", it returns zero.If you want a text-like cell that uses a different counter from the normal text cells, then you need to make up a new text style. Go to Format > Edit Stylesheet. Then click on the default.nb and copy the Text style cell into your notebook's stylesheet. Then you can modify it to have a different name (e.g., "Text2") and different counter. Then you can reference these cells numbers using
CounterBox["Text2"]
, just like you did with the normal text cells.You can also have them automatically numbered by adding the
CounterBox
to theCellDingbat
orCellFrameLabels
. See, for example: Extending cell definition to CellFrameLabels definition and CounterIncrements for individual cells