Headings & TOC

Writing headings

Wrap a line in equal signs — the count sets the level (1–6):


= Section =
== Subsection ==

Different from MediaWiki: top-level sections are written = Heading =. MediaWiki convention avoids single = (it reserves that level for the page title) and starts articles at == — here = is the normal first level, with ==, ===, … nested beneath it.

The rules the parser actually enforces:

The heading must start at the beginning of the line — a leading space turns the line into preformatted text instead.
The opening and closing runs must be the same length. = a == is an h1 whose text is a =, not a mistake the parser fixes.
Nothing but whitespace may follow the closing run — == H == trailing renders as an ordinary paragraph.

Headings are numbered automatically (1, 2, 2.1, …) and each section gets a pencil ✎ edit link when you’re logged in — it opens the editor on just that section.

Readers can click a heading to collapse its section — one of the reading niceties covered in Reading & appearance.

Anchors

Every heading gets a URL anchor derived from its text: spaces become _, and almost everything else is kept as-is (only a handful of characters are escaped). Link to one with a fragment:


[[Page Name#Section]]

Duplicate headings get suffixes: the second == Alpha == on a page anchors as Alpha_2, then Alpha_3, and so on.

The table of contents

Every page with at least one heading gets a table of contents. On wide screens it lives in the rail to the left of the article — headed by the page title, which jumps back to the top; on narrow screens it’s behind the floating ☰ button. The TOC is numbered the same way as the headings.

One magic word adjusts this:

__NOTOC__ — hide the TOC on the page you write it on.

(__TOC__, which MediaWiki uses to force and position an inline TOC, is accepted too — but since the TOC always appears and lives in the rail rather than in the article body, it changes nothing. If a page contains both, __TOC__ wins and the TOC stays.)