Add line numbers to text

What the numbers look like

Each line gets its number, a full stop and a space. The numbers are padded on the left to the width of the largest, so in a text of 120 lines the first reads “  1.” and the last “120.”, and the text after them starts in one straight column. Turn on Typewriter font in View, where every character is the same width, and the columns line up exactly.

• Every line is numbered, empty ones included. Run Remove empty lines first if only lines with text should count.
• A selection is numbered on its own, starting from 1, so you can number one section of a document and leave the rest alone.
• Numbering always starts at 1 and always uses the 1. style.
• The numbers are written into the lines as they are now. They do not update themselves when you add or remove a line, which is what renumbering, below, is for.

When numbered lines help

• Reviewing a draft. “Line 14 needs a source” is quicker to act on than a quoted half-sentence.
• Sharing code or a config file in an email or a chat, where the reader needs to point at a line.
• Poems, scripts and transcripts for a class, a rehearsal or an interview analysis.
• Questions, steps and options in a survey, a quiz or instructions you paste into a form.

Because the numbers become part of the text, they travel wherever you paste it. The line numbers Word can show in the margin (Layout, Line Numbers) are different: they belong to the document's layout and do not come along when you copy the text.

For a printed handout, number the lines here and paste the result into Documents or Word: the numbers arrive as ordinary text, ready to print with the rest.

Removing numbers and bullets

Remove numbers and bullets strips the marker from the start of each line, with the spaces before and after it:

Only a marker at the very start of a line counts, so a number later in the line, as in “Step 2. Mix the flour”, is never touched, and a line with two markers, such as “1. - Apples”, loses only the first; choose the command again for the second. Watch for lines that really start with a number and a colon: “2024: a record year” loses its “2024:”. The spaces after a marker go with it, so any indentation that followed the number does not survive the round trip.

Renumbering a list

Numbers typed by hand go wrong as soon as a list changes. In Text Studio the fix takes two clicks: Remove numbers and bullets, then Number the lines. The same pair turns a bulleted list from a web page or a chat into a numbered one, and with A to Z in between, a jumbled list comes out alphabetical and numbered.

Lists copied from Word or a PDF often arrive with a tab after each number, and sometimes with the numbers missing entirely. Both are fine: the tab is removed along with the number, and a list without numbers simply gets them.

Stripping is useful on its own, too. Lists pasted from a chat or a slide often carry dashes and bullets that a spreadsheet column, a form or a mailing tool does not want; one click leaves just the items.