Using standard text formatting conventions for lists

ID: T2

Technology: text

Type: Technique

When to Use

Plain text documents. Not applicable to technologies that contain markup.

Description

The objective of this technique is to use text formatting conventions to create simple lists of related items. Hierarchical lists or nested lists cannot be represented using this technique and should be represented using a different technology.

A list is a sequence of list items. A list item is a paragraph that begins with a label. For unordered lists, asterisks, dashes, and bullet characters may be used as the label, but the same label characters must be used for all the items in a list. For ordered lists, the label may be alphabetic or numeric, and may be terminated by a period or a right parenthesis. The labels must be in ascending order, that is,

Examples

Unordered list

						
- unordered list item
 
- unordered list item
 
- unordered list item

Numeric ordered list

						
1. Ordered list item
 
2. Ordered list item
 
3. Ordered list item

Roman numeral ordered list

						
i.   Ordered list item
 
ii.  Ordered list item
 
iii. Ordered list item
 
iv.  Ordered list item

Alphabetic ordered list

						
A) Ordered list item
 
B) Ordered list item
 
C) Ordered list item

Tests

Procedure

For each list in the text content

  1. Check that each list item is a paragraph that starts with a label
  2. Check that the list contains no lines that are not list items
  3. Check that all list items in a list use the same style label
  4. Check that the labels in ordered lists are in sequential order
  5. Check that the labels in each unordered list are the same

Expected Results

Resources