default CSS theme: only center the title header

[dhimmel]

Currently all <h1> elements are centered due the following CSS:

rootstock/build/themes/default.html

Lines 70 to 74 in 6859ada

	/* biggest heading */
	h1 {
	margin: 40px 0;
	text-align: center;
	}

However, I am thinking that the only h1 element that should be centered is the title, which pandoc denotes with class="title". Previously this was never an issue because manuscripts usually only had a single h1 heading which was the title. However, from jgm/pandoc#5071 (comment), it appears that pandoc recommends using h1 for the first level of headings (like abstract, introduction, references).

This has become an issue for manubot/manufesto#3 where I switched abstract and such to h1 in order to improve the numbed sections. See what the centering of non-title h1 elements looks like in manuscript-1.0.10-9cb98a6.pdf.

@vincerubinetti what do you think?

[vincerubinetti]

I'm not sure. In the case of your Manufesto that you linked, I think the better solution is either to just make "Intro", "Abstract", and "Features" <h2>'s along with all the features, or move those down to <h2> and move all the features down to <h3> and make <h3>'s more visually distinct (maybe with an underline like the <h2>'s have.

We had talked about having <h1> centered for the title, and the very rare case of supplements. I don't think <h1>'s should be used liberally sorta like they are in that version of the Manufesto; they should be super big-picture, and very rare.

If we were to left align non-title <h1>'s, we'd also want to decrease their text size too; it looks too big in your Manufesto.

[dhimmel]

My markdown linter in vscode seems to agree that we shouldn't use h1 for section headings:

MD025/single-title/single-h1: Multiple top level headings in the same document markdownlint(MD025)

In manubot/manufesto@0fdde9c, I tried out the --base-header-level=2 pandoc argument, such that we can type # Abstract in the markdown as suggested in jgm/pandoc#5071 (comment), but have that render as h2. The title stays as h1.

We had talked about having <h1> centered for the title, and the very rare case of supplements

Good point regarding supplements. I forgot about that use case.

Will update this issue with more final considerations, but for now thinking that I'll probably close as I think the Pandoc convention of using h1 for section headings is a bit misguided.

[agitter]

the Pandoc convention of using h1 for section headings is a bit misguided.

That's my opinion as well. h2 seems more appropriate for section headings, h1 for the main title and supplement title.

[Nebucatnetzer]

I can understand the reasoning behind this.
I noticed however that it introduces a problem with the TOC in the HTML as we can see in the example.