1.1 Purpose of the document

The CSS Counter Styles Level 3 specification defines a mechanism for authors to define almost any counter style they would want. To avoid you having to figure out how to produce the list style you want, this document predefines a large set of counter styles covering many approaches from around the world.

The Internationalization Working Group expects this document to be updated from time to time as new information or corrections are added. If you wish to propose new information to be included here, please write to www-international@w3.org.

1.2 How to use this information

This document contains ready-made templates defining counter styles that you can just cut and paste into your stylesheet. If you are to see results, the browser needs to support the generic mechanism for defining counter styles as described in CSS Counter Styles Level 3. If the browser doesn't support that mechanism, the counters will default to the ordinary numeric numbering.

In this document the counter-style templates are grouped by script (writing system). Inside a group, styles are ordered alphabetically by name.

Find the counter style you wish to use, and simply copy-paste the relevant code from this document to your style sheet. Then associate the counter-style with your markup.

For example, the following CSS code defines the arabic-indic counter style, then applies it to ordered lists using the list-style-type property.

@counter-style arabic-indic {
    system: numeric;
    symbols: '\660' '\661' '\662' '\663' '\664' '\665' '\666' '\667' '\668' '\669';
    /* symbols: '٠' '١' '٢' '٣' '٤' '٥' '٦' '٧' '٨' '٩'; */
    }

ol { list-style-type: arabic-indic; }

For clarity, in the source code, the list of counters is provided using character escapes, but, if you prefer, you can delete that line and uncomment the line below it to use actual characters instead.

The CSS Counter Styles Level 3 specification includes a number of counter-styles for which browsers are expected to implement built-in support. The definitions of those styles are also included here, for ease of reference, and identified as such by a note. Although those predefined styles are described in the specification, they may not be supported by all browsers, so it is recommended that you still use the definitions provided here in your style sheet. That way, a browser that supports the general counter-style definition mechanism but doesn't support a particular pre-defined style will still show the counters as you expect.