How do you make lettered lists using markdown?

Solution 1:

It doesn't appear that standard Markdown has this capability. You can:

1. Use CSS, by putting this somewhere in your markdown document (note, this will effect all ordered lists in the document)

<style type="text/css">
    ol { list-style-type: upper-alpha; }
</style>

2. Use an extended version of markdown. Pandoc markdown has a fancy_lists extension that will allow you to mark lists with letters and roman numerals.

Note: if using capital letters, two spaces are required before the text. See https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#fn1

A.  the letter A
A.  the letter B
A.  etc

Solution 2:

Markdown itself cannot do that, but since you can put HTML in it, this provides a pretty simple way to do it:

<ol type="a">
  <li>Coffee</li>
  <li>Tea</li>
  <li>Milk</li>
</ol>

Some derivations on some platforms might interpret only a very strict subset of HTML. For example, StackOverflow doesn't support the type attribute. But Wikipedia's MediaWiki Markdown does, and the GitHub Wiki Markdown does too.

Solution 3:

At least for recent versions of Pandoc (I'm using version 1.13.1), it looks like you can use some of the fancy_list syntax without having to enable the extension, e.g.:

I.  One                                                                                                                                                                                        
    A.  two                                                                                                                                                                                    
        1. three                                                                                                                                                                               
        2. four                                                                                                                                                                                
            i.  five                                                                                                                                                                           
            ii.  six                                                                                                                                                                           
                - seven                                                                                                                                                                        
                    * eight                                                                                                                                                                    
II.  Nine

To compile this into a PDF you can then run:

pandoc input.md -o output.pdf

NOTE: For this to work, you have to make sure you add an extra space after any letters or roman numerals: instead of the usual one space between a bullet and the text, use two instead. (see pandoc docs under "Extension: fancy_lists")

Solution 4:

Late to the party, but this might help other people looking for an R Markdown solution.

In R Markdown it's straight forward. The following minimal example lists.rmd shows different types:

---
title: "Lists"
output: pdf_document
---

A list with bullet points:

- Something
- Something else

A numeric list:

1. Something
1. Something else

A list using small letters:

a) Something
a) Something else

A list using capital letters:

A) Something
A) Something else

This knits to:

Solution 5:

To do indent formatting this is what I use:

<style type="text/css">
   /* Indent Formatting */
   /* Format: a-1-i-A-1-I */
   ol {list-style-type: lower-alpha;}
   ol ol { list-style-type: decimal;}
   ol ol ol { list-style-type: lower-roman;}
   ol ol ol ol { list-style-type: upper-alpha;}
   ol ol ol ol ol { list-style-type: decimal;}
   ol ol ol ol ol ol { list-style-type: upper-roman;}
   /* https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_list-style-type.asp */
   /* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11445453/css-set-li-indent */
   /* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13366820/how-do-you-make-lettered-lists-using-markdown */
</style> 

Links at bottom to where I sourced the information. And Format is explained on the second line.