In Google Docs, Heading 1 is an <h1>, which in VE is =Page title= level. For external pastes the best we can do is use the HTML tags we are provided.

It may be possible to detect if the paste came from Google Docs and provide a custom set of transformations (<hN> -> <hN+1>), but that would rely on there being some consistent markup in Google Docs pastes.

In T339156#8935169, @Esanders wrote:

It may be possible to detect if the paste came from Google Docs...

It looks like Google Docs pastes are always wrapped in this span:
<span id="docs-internal-guid-<some guid>">...</span>

I doubt this is a guaranteed public API, but it will probably work for a while.

There's also a custom clipboard key in clipboardData (application/x-vnd.google-docs-document-slice-clip+wrapped) which seemingly contains no actualy data.

This or the span tag could be used to detect GDocs pastes. Hard to say which is going to be more reliable, but we could check for either.

The downside of this is that if you keep copying and paste back and forth between VE and GDocs, your headings would keep decreasing in level until they were all <h6>.

In T339156#8935507, @Esanders wrote:

The downside of this is that if you keep copying and paste back and forth between VE and GDocs, your headings would keep decreasing in level until they were all <h6>.

Is that a bug, or a feature?

There is a theoretically conceptual way to fix this but I think it's too convoluted to be worth it.

Still, sharing for posterity -- we could look at the content of the copied data, and automatically make the "top most" heading be our 'heading', restarting the numbering that way.

That will prevent the back-and-forth-slimming.

... but it's probably overly complicated, and not worth it. I don't think there's many people who would copy-paste back-and-forth from GDoc to VE and back.

In T339156#8935511, @Mooeypoo wrote:

Is that a bug, or a feature?

Someone will be upset when we fix it https://xkcd.com/1172/

For reference, GDocs provides the following formats:

In T339156#8935529, @Mooeypoo wrote:

Still, sharing for posterity -- we could look at the content of the copied data, and automatically make the "top most" heading be our 'heading', restarting the numbering that way.

This works well when copying an entire document, but not so much for sections.

In T339156#8935529, @Mooeypoo wrote:

There is a theoretically conceptual way to fix this but I think it's too convoluted to be worth it.

"Patches welcome"