6.21 Dotted letters (ドット付き)

Synopsis

The ドット付き (dotted-letter) directive composes a combining dot above or below a base Latin letter in the immediately-preceding run — m → ṁ, s → ṣ. It records the diacritics of transliterated Sanskrit / Pāli that Aozora Bunko's plain-text encoding cannot spell directly. It is a forward reference with the は particle, yielding an emphasis node.

This is a distinct mechanism from the §6.19 accent decomposition of Annex A: that scheme rewrites ASCII digraphs (a + ` → à) inside a 〔…〕 span at the character level; this directive instead names a letter of the preceding run and asks for a dot. The two compose — a dotted letter frequently sits inside an already-decomposed 〔…〕 span (see the vectors).

The official 注記一覧 ([AOZORA-ANNOTATION]) lists it among the emphasis-page treatments; the corpus attests only the forward-reference form.

Notation

The directive has no 「X」 quoted target. Its body is a selector that names a letter (and, optionally, which occurrence) of the preceding run, the は particle, a position (上 above / 下 below), and the keyword ドット付き.

dotted     = run "［＃" clause *( ( "。" / "、" ) clause ) "］"
clause     = selector "は" [ set-adv ] position "ドット付き"
selector   = [ ordinal ] letters
ordinal    = number "つめの" / "最後の" / "前の" / "後の"
set-adv    = "ともに" / "それぞれ"
position   = "上" / "下"
letters    = 1*ALPHA            ; ASCII letters, case-significant for the glyph
number     = 1*DIGIT            ; ASCII or fullwidth digits

A body may carry several 。- or 、-joined clauses; every clause addresses the same preceding run, and their substitutions are applied together.

Sam［＃mは上ドット付き］
Sisa［＃２つめのsは下ドット付き］
Visnu［＃snはともに下ドット付き］
〔Mīhr〕［＃hは下ドット付き］
Samsa［＃mは上ドット付き。２つめのsは下ドット付き］
Konkana［＃前のnは上ドット付き、後のnは下ドット付き］

run is the source text immediately preceding the bracket: a bare Latin word, or a whole 〔…〕 accent span (whose tortoiseshell brackets are retained).

Parameters

selector — names the base letter(s):
- a bare letter (m) selects the first composable occurrence in the run (a word-initial capital with no dotted glyph, e.g. the N of Nara-sinha, is skipped in favour of the intended lowercase letter);
- an ordinal Nつめの / 最後の / 前の / 後の selects the N-th / last / first / last occurrence, counting case-insensitively (an uppercase S is occurrence 1 for a ２つめのs over Sīsa); 前の / 後の name the earlier / later of a letter's two occurrences across a 、-joined pair; the selected position must itself be composable;
- a cluster of several letters with ともに / それぞれ dots each listed letter's first occurrence independently (sn → the first s and first n).
position — 上 (dot above) or 下 (dot below).

The ともに / それぞれ adverb is spelling-only: it is preserved verbatim on serialization but does not change which occurrences are dotted.

Semantics

The directive resolves against the reclaimed preceding run (§7.5) and yields an emphasis node over it, with Reclaimed provenance: the run is pulled back so the composed span is its sole rendered copy, and serialization (§7.6) re-emits the literal run followed by the raw directive body, byte-exact. It is an inline construct.
Composition is NFC: each (letter, position) pair maps to a single precomposed scalar (ṁ U+1E41, ṅ U+1E45, ṃ U+1E43, ṇ U+1E47, ṣ U+1E63, ṭ U+1E6D, ḥ U+1E25, ṛ U+1E5B, ḍ U+1E0D, and capitals Ṭ U+1E6C, Ṛ U+1E5A). Composition is case-preserving (t → ṭ, T → Ṭ).
Reference rendering (§8) emits the composed run inside a wrapper —
```
ドット付き → <span class="aozora-accent-dot">…composed run…</span>
```
aozora-accent-dot does not collide with any other treatment's class.
A multi-clause body applies every clause's substitutions to the one reclaimed run (resolve-all-then-substitute, so an earlier dot never shifts a later clause's index) and still yields a single node.

Error conditions

No reclaimable run — when a 》 ruby close or Japanese text butts the bracket there is no preceding Latin run (dot-over-ruby-base is not representable in a text-only forward leaf, the bouten-over-ruby limitation of §6.2). The directive degrades to an unrecognised directive (§6.14), rendered as a hidden raw span and serialized verbatim.
Absent or un-composable occurrence — a selector naming a letter absent from the run, an ordinal out of range, or a (letter, position) pair with no precomposed glyph (e.g. an uppercase S below) degrades likewise, losing no input.
Word-qualified and 段目 forms — a word-qualified selector (simhaのm…) and a 段目 table-row reference (４段目、Sinhaのn…) address a named word or a table row rather than the adjacent run; their 、-split pieces are not pure ASCII-letter selectors, so they degrade to an unrecognised directive. A body in which any clause fails to parse degrades as a whole.

Conformance vectors

accent_dot_above, accent_dot_below, accent_dot_tortoise, accent_dot_ordinal, accent_dot_uppercase, accent_dot_cluster, accent_dot_multi_clause, accent_dot_former_latter, accent_dot_ruby_base_unknown, accent_dot_dangyou_unknown (under conformance/vectors/).

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