Document with continuous paragraph numbering in Scrivener

Yes, this can all be fairly easily done a couple of ways with styles and the compile features. This post has a sample project demonstrating a way to set up paragraph numbering as part of a compile format; the specific style of numbering there is a little different from what you want, including a scene number as well as paragraph number and restarting per scene, but the same idea would apply in your case. That also shows examples of heading level styles that are left without the paragraph numbering.

To handle the sub-numbering, you’ll need to do a little work outside of the compiler. Following the method of the above, which assumes multiple paragraphs to a binder document, you can apply a paragraph style in the editor to your sub-paragraphs, then add that in the compile format to apply the numbering to those paragraphs. So like the above, this works with styles, but in this case you’d need to do that extra step of identifying these sub-paragraphs ahead of time, in the editor. (I would not assign styles to every paragraph, since it’s unnecessary and it can get confusing at compile time if a style is overriding other formatting you’re trying to apply at that stage; you just need to mark the ones that are different from the norm, i.e. those getting sub-numbering.)

Another way of handling all of this would be through the binder structure, section types and section layouts; you needn’t use styles at all. Each binder document can have its own section type, and each section type can have its own layout in the compile format, with prefixes, suffixes, headings, and so on added at that stage. So you could work with documents of a paragraph length (you can easily view them together in the editor in Scrivenings mode, to give yourself context when writing) and give different section types to the main paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, and sub-sub-paragraphs; and that in turn is easy to automate by assigning section types by structure, so that documents at the top level in your Draft are the main paragraphs, their children are sub-paragraphs, their children are sub-sub-paragraphs and so on to whatever level you need. Then in compile, you can create a format with section layouts for each of these that include the numbering placeholder in a the section prefix, with the particular types (1, 2, 3; a, b, c; i, ii, iii) and indentation however you want it.

With that method, I’d use containers in the binder to provide the headings, compiling those as just the title; there are other ways you could do it, but that has the benefit of being part of the outline structure, so that the paragraphs pertaining to a heading could be grouped within the “heading” folder, making the outline comprehensible (e.g. if the paragraph documents are left untitled, the titled header folders would make good landmarks) and easily navigable in an overview.

And again, depending on your needs, preferred way of working, etc. you could use a combination of these; for instance, you could easily have documents with multiple main paragraphs and only split to separate the sub-paragraphs.