Are numbered headings in Markdown / Rdiscount possible?

Question

I'm trying to produce html with section / subsection headings resembling the following:

1. My top-level topic
   1.1 My first subtopic
   1.2 Another subtopic
         1.2.1 A sub-subtopic
2. Another top-level topic

Are there any implementations of Markdown capable of producing these kinds of numbered section headings?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yes, try Pandoc. This works for me:

pandoc --number-sections < test.md > out.html

(Source)

Markdown to produce the numbered outline you mention in the original post looks like this:

# My top-level topic

## My first subtopic

## Another subtopic

### A sub-subtopic

## Another top-level topic

If you want deeper indenting for sub-sections, you might be able to achieve this with inline CSS. For example, placing this at the top of the above Markdown source indents the headers:

<style type="text/css">
  h2 { margin-left: 10px; }
  h3 { margin-left: 20px; }
</style>

But say you had paragraphs of text under your headings... I don't know how to indent that to the same level as the above header.

Update 2015-10-18: Markdeep has numbered headings (and many other fancy features). Check that out too!

Answer 2

If your markdown tool supports customized theme by CSS, add below snippet into CSS to enable heading number:

body {
    counter-reset: h1
}

h1 {
    counter-reset: h2
}

h2 {
    counter-reset: h3
}

h3 {
    counter-reset: h4
}

h1:before {
    counter-increment: h1;
    content: counter(h1) ". "
}

h2:before {
    counter-increment: h2;
    content: counter(h1) "." counter(h2) ". "
}

h3:before {
    counter-increment: h3;
    content: counter(h1) "." counter(h2) "." counter(h3) ". "
}

h4:before {
    counter-increment: h4;
    content: counter(h1) "." counter(h2) "." counter(h3) "." counter(h4) ". "
}

I use Typora, which supports auto numbering for headings in this approach.

Answer 3

If you want to edit the markdown file itself, and not only the resulting HTML file, try enumerate-markdown with python 3

pip install enumerate-markdown
markdown-enum filename.md 1 filename.md

Example - input

# header 1
text
## header 2
text
# header 3
text

Output

# 1.  header 1
text
## 1.1  header 2
text
# 2.  header 3
text

if you later edit the file and run the script again, then it updates old enumeration.