Cleaning up heading levels

When creating heading levels in a document, it’s easy to get confused about which level a paragraph should be at. If you reduce a header level, the headings below need to be adjusted also, and its not till you come to creating a contents page that you notice it’s all out of line.

Here’s a snippet to adjust header levels so that sub headings are never more than one deeper than the previous header.

Adjusting heading levels

This one provides a dry run capability, where the log file tells you what it would have done. Set it to false when you are ready to go for real.

The code

// sometimes header levels get screwed up and need to be readjusted
// this will ensure that a header level is never more than one higher than the one before it
 
function workHeaderLevels () {
  
  var doc = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument();
  
  // set this to false when it looks like it does what's needed
  var DRY_RUN = true;
  
  // these are the only ones to be considered
  var heirarchy = [ 
    DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING1,
    DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING2,
    DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING3,
    DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING4,
    DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING5,
    DocumentApp.ParagraphHeading.HEADING6
  ];

  
  doc.getBody().getParagraphs().reduce (function (p,c) {
    var heading = c.getHeading();
    var idx = heirarchy.indexOf(heading);
    
    // check it's an interesting one
    if (idx !== -1) {
      if (idx > p+1) {
        p++;
        Logger.log( (DRY_RUN ? 'would have adjusted ' : 'adjusting ') + 
          c.getText().slice(0,10) + ' from ' + heading + ' to ' + heirarchy[p]);
        
        // really do it
        if (!DRY_RUN) {
          c.setHeading (heirarchy[p]);
        }

        
      }
      else {
        p = idx;
      }
    }
    return p;
  },-1);
}

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