6.2 Bouten and Bousen (傍点・傍線)

Synopsis

Bouten (傍点) are emphasis dots set beside characters in vertical text — the Japanese equivalent of italic/bold for emphasis. Bousen (傍線) are the same idea with a line. The two form one family with a 点/線 split.

Notation

Three forms produce emphasis.

Forward reference — quote the target; the emphasis applies to the most recent preceding occurrence (§7.5):

［＃「平和」に傍点］
平和［＃「平和」に傍点］      ← redundant explicit copy (also accepted)

Range — a bare opener and matching closer wrap the run directly. Note there is no ここから/ここで; those prefixes are for block layout and bold/italic, not bouten:

bouten-range = directive 1*element directive   ; ［＃<kw>］ … ［＃<kw>終わり］

彼は［＃傍点］必ず［＃傍点終わり］来る
［＃二重傍線］乙［＃二重傍線終わり］
［＃左に傍線］丙［＃左に傍線終わり］

Left side — an optional 左に prefix places the marks on the left of the vertical base text (［＃左に傍線］…, ［＃「X」の左に傍点］).

Parameters

variant — one of the fourteen keywords of Annex C.4; nine 点 and five 線. The rare 鎖線 / 破線 (線) and 黒三角傍点 (点) are official but corpus-sparse; a processor renders them like any other variant where it has a glyph, otherwise degrading them (§6.14).
family — 点 (dots) or 線 (line). The family is what pairing checks for the range form (§7.2).
position — right (default) or left (左に).
target — for the forward-reference form, the quoted run to emphasise.

Semantics

The forward-reference form resolves its target by the look-back rule of §7.5 and yields a bouten node over that run.
The range form pairs opener and closer by family (§7.1) and yields a container node (family-tagged bouten-range) over the enclosed content. It is an inline construct (§7.3): in the corpus it never spans a line, and rendering does not introduce block structure.
Reference rendering (§8) is <em class="aozora-bouten aozora-bouten-<slug> aozora-bouten-<side>">…</em>, the same markup for both forms so a stylesheet treats them identically.
Serialization (§7.6) reconstructs the source form, including a redundant forward-reference target copy and a 左に prefix, byte-exact.

Error conditions

Family mismatch (range) — a 点 opener closed by a 線 closer, or vice-versa, raises mismatched-bouten-container (error); the run is keyed to the opener's variant (recovery). A same-family variant difference (e.g. 白丸傍点 closed by 丸傍点終わり) is tolerated.
Ambiguous target (forward reference) — a quoted target occurring more than once in the look-back raises bouten-target-ambiguous (warning).
Target with no referent (forward reference) — a single-target に<kw> / の左に<kw> directive whose quoted target does not occur in the look-back is a self-contained forward bouten: the quoted run is itself the marked text, rendered <em class="aozora-bouten …">, and serialization reconstructs the directive byte-exact (§7.6). A no-referent target has zero look-back occurrences, so it never raises bouten-target-ambiguous. A multi-target bracket (「A」「B」) with any missing target is not promoted and degrades to a generic annotation (§6.14): non-contiguous targets cannot be spliced into one leaf.
Unclosed range — an opener with no closer is handled per unclosed-bracket.

Conformance vectors

bouten-target-ambiguous, bouten_range, bouten_range_chain_line, bouten_chain_line, bouten_black_triangle, mismatched-bouten-container, mixed_ruby_bouten, bouten_forward_no_referent.

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