Re: <h1> vs. <h2>

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Oct 08, 2011 at 04:17:16PM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Patrice -- I'm sorry, but I can't remember if we discussed this
> already.  tp generates <h1> for @unnumbered, etc.  C makeinfo generates
> <h2>.  I find <h1> awfully loud.  Also, it seems like <h1>
> would be the overall document title, so <h2> for chapter-level things
> doesn't seem logically wrong.  Did we intentionally choose to switch to
> <h1>?

I don't remember anything specific.  I remember vaguely a discussion on a 
texinfo mailing list is that h4 (I believe) was in general considered a bit 
small.  I just tested in firefox that indeed h4 is already the size of the 
text (but bold), while h5 is smaller than text.  If chapter is h2 then 
subsubsection should be h5 which wouldn't look good...

In my opinion, for big manuals, that, still in my opinion, are best split 
at @chapter, using h1 leads to a good-looking result (a typical example would
be the texinfo manual itself).  For small manuals, indeed h1 for chapter is 
too big. 

Maybe the best could be to set the correspondence between h level and 
sectioning level depending on the lowest level element?  Another approach
could be to let the user choose the top sectioning level by not using 
higher level elements.  For instance, to have h2, one whould only use
sectioning commands below @section.  The result looks good for texi2any.
In texi2dvi, the numbering is 0.1, 0.2, I don't know if you want to modify
texinfo.tex such that it is instead 1 and 2.

In any case, it would be trivial to use a configuration variable like 
  HEADER_LEVEL_MODIFIER
to modify the level prior from outputting the h?.
It could also be possible to have a
  MAX_HEADER_LEVEL
which would determine the highest level.  For example if set to 4, even if
the calculated level is 5 or 6 the header is set to h4.

(There is already an implicit minimal header level which is 1.)

-- 
Pat