MDS018: no-emphasis-as-heading

Don’t use bold or emphasis on a standalone line as a heading substitute.

# Settings

Useful tokens: var-token, heading-question, placeholder-section.

# Config

Enable:

rules:
  no-emphasis-as-heading: true

Disable:

rules:
  no-emphasis-as-heading: false

# Examples

# Bad

# Title

**Bold line as heading**

# Good

# Title

This is a normal paragraph.

# Good – bold inside a table cell

Emphasis inside a pipe-table cell is intentional inline styling (a row-label stub, a bold flag column) rather than a heading substitute. MDS018 defers to the table-format rule and leaves these alone.

# Table With Bold Stub

| Stub      | Value |
| --------- | ----- |
| **Alpha** | 1     |
| **Beta**  | 2     |

# See also

• Placeholder grammar

# Meta-Information

• ID: MDS018
• Name: no-emphasis-as-heading
• Status: ready
• Default: enabled
• Fixable: no
• Implementation: source
• Category: heading
• markdownlint: MD036 (no-emphasis-as-heading)
• rumdl: MD036 (no-emphasis-as-heading)
• mado: MD036 (no-emphasis-as-heading)
• gomarklint: no-emphasis-as-heading