[texhax] Paragraph numbering

[Robin Fairbairns]

> I would appreciate any advice on sequentially numbering paragraphs
> through a document. I have used the packages lineno.sty and
> numline.sty in the past and they work well when it comes to numbering
> individual lines. However, I cannot find any equivalent packages
> mentioned in the FAQ for numbering paragraphs. Any advice would be
> welcome.

it doesn't appear in the faq, because there isn't really an answer
(leastways, not in latex: plain tex users may have more luck since
they've more control over what's happening).

some long time back, i wrote a primitive thing for a fellow research
student who had to give an expert opinion for the defence of some poor
bloke who was being shafted by his bank.

i've lost my original, but someone else has found it and worked on it,
and someone else again has put it up on

  http://mechanics.civil.tohoku.ac.jp/~bear/bear-collections/style-files/numberpar.sty

i've had bright ideas about improving it over the years, but faced with
the code in front of me again, i've chickened out.

perhaps it'll help -- it's documented (in comments in the .sty file) as
if for latex2.09

otherwise, there's a paragraph numberer on sarovar.org somewhere.  last
i looked at it, it was more primitive even than my one was all those
years ago when i lost it.  but maybe it's been improved since.

the problem is, that the "natural" tex primitive (\everypar -- a token
register, as it happens) to do the job is also heavily used by latex for
all sorts of things, so that it's very difficult to turn it to the
business of generating a paragraph number while not interfering with the
rest of latex.

r