International standard ISO

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

 2145 defines a typographic convention for the "numbering of divisions and subdivisions in written documents". It applies to any kind of document, including manuscripts, books, journal articles, and standards.

Description

The ISO 2145 numbering scheme is defined by the following rules:

• Only Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, …) are used.

• The main divisions are numbered continuously starting from 1.

• Each main division (first level) can be divided further into subdivisions (second level), which are equally continuously numbered. This can be continued for further levels of subdivision.

• A full stop
  Full stop
  A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...
  
   is placed between numbers that designate subdivisions of different levels. No full stop is placed after the number that designates the final subdivision.

• A number 0 (zero) can be assigned to the first division of each level if it forms an introduction
  Introduction (essay)
  An introduction is a beginning section which states the purpose and goals of the following writing. The introduction is usually interesting and it intrigues the reader and causes him or her to want to read on. The sentence in which the introduction begins can be a question or just a statement...
  
  , preface
  Preface
  A preface is an introduction to a book or other literary work written by the work's author. An introductory essay written by a different person is a foreword and precedes an author's preface...
  
  , foreword
  Foreword
  A foreword is a piece of writing sometimes placed at the beginning of a book or other piece of literature. Written by someone other than the primary author of the work, it often tells of some interaction between the writer of the foreword and the book's primary author or the story the book tells...
  
  , or the like.

Example

A table of contents might look like:

0	Foreword
1	Introduction
2	Methodology
2.1	Counting techniques
2.1.1	Manual procedures
2.1.1.1	Counting apples
2.1.1.2	Counting oranges
2.1.2	Automatic methods
2.2	Quality control
3	Results
4	Related work
4.1	Bean counting
4.2	Sheep counting
5	Conclusions

Citations

Division and subdivision numbers are cited in written text as in:

• … in chapter 4 …
• … as lemma 3.4.27 shows …
• … the 3rd paragraph in 2.4.1.7 …

In spoken language, the full stops are omitted:

• "… in chapter four …"
• "… as lemma three four twenty-seven shows …"
• "… the third paragraph in two four one seven …"

Support in word processing software

• All standard LaTeX
  LaTeX
  LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
  
   document classes generate chapter, section, subsection, figure, table, etc. numbers exactly as defined by ISO 2145.

• As of 2003, all Microsoft Word
  Microsoft Word
  Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
  
  versions are by default set up to add a full stop after the final section number. This does not conform to ISO 2145; however, users can change settings to conform to the ISO standard.