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@@ -6834,3 +6834,18 @@ The control now reads all three registers at `##` and `###`, recognises `ADDENDU
 **The residual disagreement is reported, not reconciled.** ADDENDUM 1's filed table says **81**; its own method re-run today says **82**. The difference is **this session's later filing**, not a classifier difference. **The table stands as filed.**
 
 **Live at time of filing:** 32 attributable blocks checked, all resolve; **50 NOT ESTABLISHED** (48 unnumbered headers, 2 in-body) — counted, never passed. 59/59 instrument controls pass.
+
+## PENDING-177 — AMENDMENT 1: the rule already exists and is general; what is missing is its application, and my framing of the July record was wrong
+**Date:** 2026-08-31
+**Tag:** [ESCALATE]
+**Summary:** Reading the 2026-07-19 and 2026-07-20 rulings themselves rather than the runbook's summary of them changes this item in three ways. (i) My statement that the July record treated the mid-word defect as an EPUB-parse property is **false** — the ruling said "parse-time loss in **its own document model**" and REVIEWED-67 Q4 ruled the eligibility rule **general**. There is no false premise to correct; there is a general rule that was never applied to the PDF class. (ii) The genuine defect in the ratified text is Q2's **mechanism-boundary**, which I can now evidence. (iii) Two obligations from REVIEWED-67 are undischarged at 42 days, and one of them is the direct cause of the failure I reported.
+**Correction to my own report:** I told the steward "we recorded it as an EPUB-parse property; it isn't." The record does not say that. What was scoped to EPUB was the *routing stop*, because that is where the evidence stood. The doctrine was already general. The error was mine, not the jurist's, and it made a correctly-general ruling look like a narrow one.
+**The Q2 boundary, with evidence.** REVIEWED-67 Q2 refined the ineligibility to *"any source class whose Docling path routes through the HTML backend is ineligible pending census"* — named by mechanism, explicitly for "mechanistic accuracy for what comes later." This is what came later, and the naming is one layer too low:
+ · All four docling PDF backends flatten every curly quote to a spaced straight apostrophe (`docling_parse`, `dlparse_v1`, `dlparse_v4`, `pypdfium2` — 134 → 0 curly on a 20-page pilot, each).
+ · `docling --to json` shows the **document model itself** carries **0 curly / 380 straight**. The loss is at parse, before any markdown serialization, and independent of backend choice.
+ ⇒ The defect is in the document model shared by *all* input formats, not in the HTML backend. As drawn, the boundary does not catch the PDF class though the identical defect and the ruling's own identical mechanism-description are present there. **I have not re-scoped it — that is the jurist's to correct.**
+**Two undischarged REVIEWED-67 obligations:**
+ · **The Q4 byte-census.** Q4 gates *adoption as canonical front-end for a class*, not use. `conversion-runbook.yaml` already routes `pdf_textlayer` → docling, so **docling is already adopted as the canonical PDF front-end with no census** — the identical PENDING-56 error repeated in a second format class. No typography byte-census artifact exists in `_curation/` or `docs/` for *any* class; the census Q3 conditioned on being specified as declared data was never specified either.
+ · **The per-conversion typography gate** — the ruling's "forward item, unconditioned": *"run per conversion… it becomes a wired gate that catches converter-version drift, per-file anomalies, and any future front-end's silent normalization — without anyone having to predict which converter might misbehave."* Not built; the gate list is `verify_conversion · verify_graduation · body_word_conservation · sidecar_gate`. **Its absence is exactly why `verify_conversion` returned 5/5 on word-damaged output.** My run is an instance of the failure the jurist predicted 42 days before it happened.
+**Bundling error, corrected.** PENDING-177 as filed bundled a FIX with a PROPOSAL under one ID — the CLASS E defect PENDING-146 names (the open list's unit is the ID; the decidable unit is the item), which left a damage-reducing fix blocked behind a ruling it does not need. **Split, and the FIX has landed:** `pdf_textlayer` now carries `--pdf-backend pypdfium2 --image-export-mode placeholder`, since Q1 confirmed lane routing is declared data revisable without supersession, and the change strictly reduces damage and alters nothing a gate accepts. The runbook records, at the point of work, that the flag fix is **not** a censused adoption. What remains under -177 is the eligibility question alone.
+**Awaiting:** Jurist correction of the Q2 mechanism-boundary; steward direction on the two undischarged obligations. The Brown candidate stays staged either way.