How do you make lettered lists using markdown?

Question

It doesn't appear that standard Markdown has this capability. You can:

1. Use CSS, by putting this somewhere in your markdown document (note, this will effect all ordered lists in the document)

<style type="text/css">
    ol { list-style-type: upper-alpha; }
</style>

2. Use an extended version of markdown. Pandoc markdown has a fancy_lists extension that will allow you to mark lists with letters and roman numerals.

Note: if using capital letters, two spaces are required before the text. See https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#fn1

A.  the letter A
A.  the letter B
A.  etc

Markdown itself cannot do that, but since you can put HTML in it, this provides a pretty simple way to do it:

<ol type="a">
  <li>Coffee</li>
  <li>Tea</li>
  <li>Milk</li>
</ol>

Some derivations on some platforms might interpret only a very strict subset of HTML. For example, StackOverflow doesn't support the type attribute. But Wikipedia's MediaWiki Markdown does, and the GitHub Wiki Markdown does too.

At least for recent versions of Pandoc (I'm using version 1.13.1), it looks like you can use some of the fancy_list syntax without having to enable the extension, e.g.:

I.  One                                                                                                                                                                                        
    A.  two                                                                                                                                                                                    
        1. three                                                                                                                                                                               
        2. four                                                                                                                                                                                
            i.  five                                                                                                                                                                           
            ii.  six                                                                                                                                                                           
                - seven                                                                                                                                                                        
                    * eight                                                                                                                                                                    
II.  Nine

To compile this into a PDF you can then run:

pandoc input.md -o output.pdf

NOTE: For this to work, you have to make sure you add an extra space after any letters or roman numerals: instead of the usual one space between a bullet and the text, use two instead. (see pandoc docs under "Extension: fancy_lists")

Late to the party, but this might help other people looking for an R Markdown solution.

In R Markdown it's straight forward. The following minimal example lists.rmd shows different types:

---
title: "Lists"
output: pdf_document
---

A list with bullet points:

- Something
- Something else

A numeric list:

1. Something
1. Something else

A list using small letters:

a) Something
a) Something else

A list using capital letters:

A) Something
A) Something else

This knits to:

To do indent formatting this is what I use:

<style type="text/css">
   /* Indent Formatting */
   /* Format: a-1-i-A-1-I */
   ol {list-style-type: lower-alpha;}
   ol ol { list-style-type: decimal;}
   ol ol ol { list-style-type: lower-roman;}
   ol ol ol ol { list-style-type: upper-alpha;}
   ol ol ol ol ol { list-style-type: decimal;}
   ol ol ol ol ol ol { list-style-type: upper-roman;}
   /* https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_list-style-type.asp */
   /* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11445453/css-set-li-indent */
   /* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13366820/how-do-you-make-lettered-lists-using-markdown */
</style> 

Links at bottom to where I sourced the information. And Format is explained on the second line.