Heading
Key point: Use headings to define the content hierarchy of your document or publication.

Headings indicate the nature of the content following them. PageSeeder uses heading to compute your content hierarchy and build the table of contents of your document. 

Heading levels

PageSeeder defines 6 levels of heading.

Title heading

Heading level 1 (or H1) is the highest level of heading, usually reserved for the document heading. As the most important heading, it tells what the purpose of the overall page is.

We recommend that your document heading matches the document title to avoid confusion.

If you publish your document to a website, only use one H1 per page, as it is better practice for accessibility and for SEO (search engine optimization).

Most document templates include a title section with a single fragment, that is designed to have a single H1.

Heading hierarchy

Heading levels indicate their relative importance and reflect the organization of the content in the document.

As the PageSeeder table of contents is built from the heading levels, it is important not to skip levels. Although this doesn’t cause any error, it results in a poorly formatted table of contents, leaving your readers wondering where the missing headings might be.

Other software, including assistive technology, use headings to compute the table of contents, so it’s especially important not to skip headings:

  • In a large publication, where the table of contents is computed from many documents.
  • If you publish your document to a website to help readers with using screen reading software, as they jump from heading to heading to quickly determine the content.
  • If you publish your document as a Word document.
  • If you publish your document or publication as PDF, because the headings are used for PDF bookmarks.
  • If SEO is important.

We recommend that you start a fragment with a heading. A heading is a natural way to start your fragment because it makes it easier to see where fragments start and end. Starting with a heading also provides PageSeeder with a more natural name to refer to the fragment in the user interface.

Numbering

By default, headings have no numbering. 

You can add numbering to a heading so that it is preceded by a numbering prefix in the document and in the table of contents.

Auto-numbering

PageSeeder defaults to auto-numbering.

Managers configure auto-numbering at the project level – for more information, see publication type.

The auto-numbering automatically numbers headings based on their position in the numbering hierarchy and scheme in the publication configuration. This means that the numbering changes automatically when the numbering of the preceding heading changes or when the document’s position changes in a publication.

Auto-numbering is particularly useful in a publication, as PageSeeder automatically recomputes the numbering even when documents are inserted, moved or removed from the publication.  

Manual numbering

If you prefer controlling the numbering manually, or the prefix doesn’t match your numbering scheme, you can manually specify the prefix for the heading.

For developers

In PSML, headings are represented using the <heading> element.

For more information, see the heading element in the PSML reference on the PageSeeder developer’s website.