Soft Dotted

Soft Dotted is a character attribute that marks letters traditionally written with a dot above, such as i and j, where that dot must be removed or suppressed when a combining diacritic is added on top. This prevents visual clutter and overlapping marks, as seen in Lithuanian or Vietnamese orthography. The property applies to both uppercase and lowercase forms, and its behavior is critical for rendering, searching, and casing operations. When a soft dotted character combines with a mark like a macron or caron, the dot disappears automatically, while the base letter keeps its identity. This also affects text processing, as software must know when to strip the dot for correct display, and when to restore it in plain, unaccented contexts. For example, the Romanian Ș or Turkish dotless ı are not soft dotted, while i, j, and their accented variants are. The property ensures consistent typography across scripts.