Would it be possible to add unlimited header level

What I’m trying to do

I have a bunch of notes in org file and want to transfer to obsidian. In org-mode, the heading level is unlimited. I would prefer to hold that way since it do helps on separating different type of things

Things I have tried

I’ve searched on internet while it says that it is impossible to make markdown support more than 6 level of headers.

Thus I would like to ask the possibility of that, thanks

Markdown translates into html, and there isn’t anything beyond <h6>, so in that sense it is not possible to do unlimited header levels.

Theoretically though, there is an option related to to implementing some system where you indicate the header level textually. Two variants of such a scheme, I’ll present below.

Using a level indicator

I’m thinking along the lines of using the first few levels as ordinary, and then at a given level start using numbers to indicate level. Something like the following:

## Second header level
### Third header level
#### Fourth header level
##### #5# Fifth level
##### #6# Sixth level
##### ...
##### #n'th# level

Here I used #n# to indicate levels above level 4, and leaving the sixth level incase one would like to use that for figure or tables or something like that. You could of course opt for any numbering scheme you like, and which you feel is most appropriate.

Generating these headers if not manually, would indicate some system capable of reviewing the last few header levels, and the ability to select parent, sibling or children of those levels.

Using hierarchy indicators

Another example of how to do something like this, which might be useful is to use some hierarchy indicators, like parent and child, to indicate where this section belongs in the hierarchy. This I believe there are several plugins which implement in various ways.

Two which spring to mind are the Breadcumbs or Excalibrain plugin.

The Breadcrumbs using syntax like the following:

---
up: [[Year 2022 courses]]
same: [[Course. 103 - Basics of Programming]]
---
# Course. 101 - Basics of Financing
This course teaches the basics of financing. It contains several sub-areas:
- down:: [[101 - Basics of Financing. Lectures]]
- down:: [[101 - Basics of Financing. Group work]]
- down:: [[101 - Basics of Financing. Essay]]

Next:: [[Course. 201 - Advanced Financing]]

which can be shown as breadcrumb trails or section lists. It can also be shown as graphs using the Juggle plugin.

Excalibrain uses similar notation, and they describe their structure like this:

ExcaliBrain distinguishes 4 type of relationships between your notes:

  • Children
  • Parents
  • Friends
  • Siblings

Relationships are derived based on the following logic

  • Explicitly defined relationships specified by using dataview fields. (e.g. Author:: [[Isaac Asimov]])
  • Inferred relationships (without the use of dataview fields)
    • A forward-link is inferred as a child
    • A backlink is inerred as a parent
    • If files mutually link to each other they are friends
    • The children of the parents are the siblings

The presentation in Excalibrain seems to be more focused on graph views and possibilities to limit these using different means.


In summary, extending HTML by itself to more than six levels I think you can let go. You can however either use visual indicators to indicate your levels, or use some structure to indicate relationships between your header levels simulating unlimited header levels.

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