Letter-ordered lists

[kimslawson]

I frequently try to create nested lists on Discourse and am frustrated by the inability to do so using letters and roman numerals, even in a conservative lowercase-only subset.

My minimum viable feature set would be simply a conservative parsing of
a) / a.
b) / b.
c) / c.
…
and
i) / i.
ii) / ii.
iii) / iii.
…
This might be made easier by requiring indentation, as with the current list formats.

A more feature complete implementation would resemble @crissov’s list above,

@Crissov

|Type|Tight|Loose|

|numeric decimal, single-digit|1. , 1) , (1.) , (1) , #1|1. , 1) , (1.) , (1) , #1|
|numeric decimal, multiple-digits|(12) , #12|12. , 12) , (12.) , (12) , #12|
|lowercase Roman numeral|(i.) , - i. , * i. , + i.|i. , (i.) , - i. , * i. , + i. , - i , * i , + i|
|uppercase Roman numeral|(I.)|I. , (I.)|
|lowercase Latin, single-letter|a) , (a)|a) , (a)|
|uppercase Latin, single-letter|A) , (A)|A) , (A)|
|lowercase Latin, multiple-letters|—|ab) , (ab)|
|uppercase Latin, multiple-letters|–|AB) , (AB)|
|lowercase Greek, single-letter|α. , α) , (α)|α. , α) , (α) , - α , * α , + α|

It’s not entirely trivial to implement, because in addition to @Chuck_Roberts’ suggestion that

@Chuck_Roberts

All that would be needed is

1. A command to change the CSS for a normal list. CSS and HTML already support lettered lists.

there would, of course, also need to be several parsing rules added to translate the different types of lettered and roman numeral lists in markdown to the equivalent in HTML/CSS.

That said, I, for one, welcome the trivial implementation of this into CommonMark, and eventually maybe the extended implementation.