Sharon replied to my off-list reply (my fault), so I copy the salient
snippet from her reply back in here:
> Thanks for getting back to me. This is as you can see, Chapter 6.
>
> ````
> * Chapter 6
> :PROPERTIES:
> - - [ ] arrives at Vetera where they build yet another marching camp, and the
> second century of the XXth legion are ordered to board ships which will take
> them and the heavy equipment and non-essential supplies and to be the advance
> party arriving at or near Gesoriacum (Boulogne).
>
> 1. [ ] /Purpose of the scene/
> - [ ] *Advance the plot* — ~something new happens that changes the
> situation~ =
[...snip...]
> ````
> I've tried various permutations of the boxes in a drawer, but
> none of them work because they've nuked the order part of the list,
> and they convert the whole list to an unordered list.
I see the problem. It's not to do with the drawer (though see below) or
the checkboxes. It's this line:
- - [ ] arrives at Vetera [...]
The leading hyphen starts an unordered list on the same level as the
"1." that marks the start of the ordered list, and the empty line
between them is disregarded, so Org sees this as all the same list, and
when the list is updated by ticking a checkbox, the whole thing is
consistently formatted as an unordered list, as indicated by the "first"
item.
You could fix this e.g. by ending the first "list" with
some intervening text starting in the first column:
````
- - [ ] arrives at Vetera [...]
Checklist:
1. [ ] /Purpose of the scene/ [...]
````
Or perhaps you don't need to make "arrives at Vetera [...]" a list item
(it's only one item, not a list, and does it actually need a checkbox?).
Or perhaps you can make it item 1 of the ordered list, e.g.
````
1. [ ] /Scene/: arrives at Vetera [...]
2. [ ] /Purpose of the scene/
- [ ] *Advance the plot* [...]
````
Any of this should do.
Also note: The drawer with the name PROPERTIES is a special drawer,
intended to be used to store data in a =:Property: Value= format (see
https://orgmode.org/manual/Property-Syntax.html). The manual says you
cannot use it for anything else (see
https://orgmode.org/manual/Drawers.html). This is not the cause of the
problem you reported, but it's likely to cause other problems, so I
suggest using a different drawer name. You can call your drawers pretty
much anything you like except `PROPERTIES' and `results', e.g. like
this:
````
:CHECKLIST:
1. [ ] /Scene/: arrives at Vetera [...]
2. [ ] /Purpose of the scene/
- [ ] *Advance the plot* [...]
:END:
````
Regards,
Christian
