Dokuwiki actually recognises up to five levels of headers. It frustrates me slightly that it doesn't take advantage of the fact that html supports up to six levels of headers, but c'est la vie.
You correctly note that the default formatting includes indented sections. This feature can be removed by adding some custom css code. In the
/conf/userstyle.css file, add the following lines:
/* Remove the default section indenting behaviour */
div.dokuwiki h1, div.dokuwiki h2, div.dokuwiki h3,
div.dokuwiki h4, div.dokuwiki h5 {
margin-left: 0;
clear: none;
}
div.dokuwiki div.level1, div.dokuwiki div.level2,
div.dokuwiki div.level3, div.dokuwiki div.level4,
div.dokuwiki div.level5 {
margin-left: 0;
clear: none;
}
That will remove all section level indenting. If you want to add css code to format your headers in different ways, you can add more css code in the same file.
When a page grows, you add a HIGHER level of organisation, you do not normally introduce more lower levels. So you normally do not start out with level1 always; you start out with the lowest level that is actually required for your page, not the other way around.
On this, I must humbly beg to differ. I start out with level 1 headers, and add more lower-level headers as the page grows. It seems almost counter-intuitive to go the other way.
But my H2 has the solid underline, and the H1 therefore must have it too, if it is a higher level. I prefer only a single one of those lines per page.
If you use the include plugin, you can have pages included that are nothing more that packages of custom css code that are applied to whatever content page the css page is included into. This would be one way to have different H2 styling depending on context.
We have a wiki based on indenting. Not all wikis indent. Mediawiki doesn't indent. If you look at Wikipedia, visually they separate the first header from the second, with an introduction and the TOC. This ensures that you do not have 2 underlines after each other. All of the other sections are just bold captions.
As many templates for dokuwiki move that table of contents, it is not useful as a default means of dividing content and headers.
Regarding the header levels and the number of "=" signs needed, you may be interested to know that the creole plugin (
https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:creole) contains an option to "reverse the polarity" so that the top-level herader requires a single = symbol, and lower levels take more.