Recently, I had been set the task of recreating specifically formatted documents using the PDF web page rendering capabilities of the Salesforce platform.
The layout of the document I had to re-create included a alphabetically ordered list that represented a specific list of notes directly relating to how the recipient should use the form. When attempting to generate these notes in the PDF using standard attributes in apex tags, the list format would appear incorrectly, showing dots and numbers.
The solution required a different approach, using CSS styling to handle the appearance of the list instead. A deeper technical exploration of the problem and solution can be found on my technical blog.