Optionally numbered sections

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I’d like to have numbered sections/chapters in general, but not for the landing page which is just a short preface. Right now, the landing page gets numbered as 1, and the first content section is 2. Not a huge deal, but a little awkward.

Describe the solution you’d like

It’d be great if individual sections could be optionally un-numbered, or if that’s not possible, if we could start the numbering at 0.

Similarly, I have an appendix, that is currently unnumbered, but would be awesome if it could start at A.

Forgive me if this is already possible, but I wasn’t able to find a way to do it.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Living in a cruel, 1-based world.

Additional context

Basically I want TeX’s \section*{foo} and/or explicit control over numbering.

[choldgraf]

I think this will change in the way you describe when https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/pull/768 is merged, though I should note that this will also slightly change how you trigger numbering (in the _toc.yml file with :numbered: true)

[choldgraf]

I don’t believe that it is currently possible with Sphinx - there’s an issue about it here: https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/6614

Since this issue is now resolved, I’ll close it and open a new one to specifically cover changing numbering styles: https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/issues/1646