Manual numbering in bookdown

Question

Is it possible to control chapter/section numbering in bookdown?

e.g.

# Introduction {1}
# Theory {14}
# Methods {3}

would give the following in the output...

1. Introduction
14. Theory
3. Methods

Answer 1

Sorry for the late answer, but I've just bumped into the same issue.

If you globally turn off numbering, adding the line

number_sections: false

under bookdown::gitbook: to your _output.yml file, then you can number your chapters and sections in any way you like:

# 1. Introduction

# 14. Theory

# 3. Methods

To repeat: my _output.yml file contains the lines

bookdown::gitbook:
  number_sections: false

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you are trying to do: The curly brackets at the end of a header are not to control section numbering. You can use it to manually assign an ID to a section header

e.g. # Introduction {#intro}

and/or to exclude the header from numbering

e.g. # Introduction {-} respectively at the same time # Introduction {- #intro}.