I use folders for chapters in my novel, files for segments within the chapter. I have been compiling using numbered chapters with their titles (and not the file titles). An editor suggested that it would be better just to number the chapters … no titles. I can’t figure out how to do this seemingly simple task. Surely instructions appear somewhere in the user manual, but I can’t find them. Help!
Yes, this is fairly easy to do. As you may know, titles (and indeed the look and structure of all content) is set up in the Formatting compile option pane. The top half of this pane lets you set up binder item types, and optionally depth (which would let you use one title style for top-level folders and another for all folders indented below; useful for Part/Chapter arrangements). You’ll probably see a single folder icon in this top list, similar to the screenshot below.
The first thing you’ll need to do is disable title output by unchecking the pink highlighted box. That might sound unintuitive since ultimately you do want a title—but this checkbox specifically only outputs the title of the binder item. These checkboxes refer to pieces of information provided by the binder items, not what we want to do with them, in a publishing sense.
If you started with a template, that probably leaves you with something like “Chapter One” with an extra space beneath it. So to refine this further, click the [b]Section Layout...[/b] button in the lower half, where the actual look of each type of binder item is set up. You can use the [b]Edit/Insert/Auto-Number/[/b] sub-menu if you are unfamiliar with the various counter tokens available. Depicted in the screenshot is [b]<$W>[/b], which prints the all-capital localised word form. [b]<$n>[/b] would insert numerals.
That should be all you need to do! You may wish to style the look of the numbering in the mock editor below, where the chapter number is highlighted in green in the screenshot, then try re-compiling with these settings and see if it looks okay.
For further information, these features are documented in §24.11 (starting on pg. 372), which is the section on the Formatting compile option pane. That section thoroughly describes the whole pane, though, the specific tools for changing the title are in “Section Layout”, pg. 377–9.