Numbering sections, subsections etc manually

Question

I want to number nested sections, subsections, paragraphs etc manually without using commands like \section{Section},\paragraph{Paragraph} like this:

1 1.1 1.1.1 ...

How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you'd want to do this. Even more, I believe you shouldn't discharge the usual commands: if you don't like the appearance of section headings there's the package titlesec that allows for changing them.

Here I propose a \DIV macro that can be called with an optional argument and a mandatory argument for the subdivision level; the optional argument is the number to use (if not specified, just step the normal counter).

\usepackage{xparse}
\NewDocumentCommand{\DIV}{om}{%
  \IfValueT{#1}{\setcounter{#2}{\numexpr#1-1\relax}}%
  \csname #2\endcsname
}

Now you can call

\DIV[42]{section}{The answer to the fundamental question}

and the section will be numbered 42. If the next section is called with

\DIV{section}{Don't panic!}

it will be numbered 43.

Should you want to remove this manual numbering, just comment the \IfValueT line.

Answer 2

If it's an ad hoc document and you just want the section numbers to match whatever documents the notes are for, a simple solution is to use the * form to suppress numbers and add them as part of the title

\section*{1.24.33 my title} 


\section*{2.3 my next title}

\section*{1.33 my numbers aren't in order} 

Answer 3

It can be a bit frustrating if the only answers to "How do I do that?" are "Don't." Especially if it's very easy to do what you want (and I can imagine use cases). A bit of researching in the internet (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Counters) shows that the command you are looking for is \setcounter{section}{23}, where 23 is the number you want to set it to.

So you'd have something like

\setcounter{section}{23}
\section{My great section}

And it will output "My great section" with number 24, as \section further increases the counter. Works the same for subsection and so on.