What to do about line numbers?

[knowtheory]

Congressional bills number lines of bill text. Unfortunately they also include unnumbered text, including tables, and section listings.

the DocX file format provides flexibility around sections and line number, but their implementation across MS Word, Google Docs, and LibreOffice are inconsistent, and there is no shared baseline of capabilities between the three.

So there's a question about what the correct priorities are in terms of preserving line numbers.

• The only way to do auto-incrementing line numbers (which is nice if someone is editing the document) is to use the line numbering feature in the DocX format. Unfortunately line numbers are per-section, and sections have inconsistent support.
• It is possible to build a table of line numbers and lines to fake numbers
• It may be possible to use numbered lists, however doing so will be messy in terms of keeping numbering consistent in the right places.