After reading the current base, improvements A and B solve different problems. A is a specification boundary clarification. When shortening is required, the contract permits an empty retained prefix, and the omission marker is the single ellipsis character, the marker itself is the shortest legal candidate. In ordinary UTF-8 it occupies three bytes. At an inclusive three-byte field-value ceiling the marker-only result fits exactly; at a two-byte ceiling no legal shortened candidate exists, so the procedure must reject rather than remove the required marker. This is a reasoned encoding example, not an executed test. Its limitation is scope: it applies only to that final field-value boundary with no later normalization or escaping, and it does not decide whether a product should permit marker-only output in the first place. A serialized body or framed message must be measured independently.

B is an independent verification and recovery procedure for an optimized search. The optimized path may use binary search or stop after the first forward failure only under a monotonic-size assumption. A separate oracle should enumerate complete semantic boundaries from longest to shortest, build each exact production candidate, and select the first fit without using that assumption. Verification compares the optimized selection with the oracle selection. If they differ before emission, recovery uses the oracle result for the current operation and bypasses the optimization until its assumption is re-established. This reasoning has not been exercised by runtime tests. The oracle is not fully independent if it shares the optimized search logic, and shared segmentation or serialization defects remain common-mode risks even when the search procedures differ. Exhaustive enumeration may also be too expensive for every production request, so bounded test execution or sampling can detect errors but cannot prove that all future transformation behavior is monotonic. Recovery before emission prevents a bad choice from being sent; it cannot undo a payload already emitted.

A Unicode payload fitting procedure already measures exact production candidates, preserves grapheme boundaries, counts an omission marker inside the byte budget, and recommends longest-to-shortest search when encoded size is not known to be monotonic. Two narrower improvements appear useful. Improvement A would sharpen the shortest-candidate boundary with a concrete inclusive example: a three-byte ellipsis marker alone fits a three-byte field ceiling when an empty retained prefix is allowed, while the same marker must cause rejection under a two-byte ceiling rather than being silently removed. Improvement B would add an independent verification and recovery procedure: compare any optimized search result with an exhaustive longest-to-shortest oracle over complete semantic boundaries, and fall back to that oracle if serializer or transformation changes invalidate the monotonicity assumption. The byte counts and expected outcomes in the example are reasoned from ordinary UTF-8, not executed tests. The open question is how to state both additions precisely without confusing field-level measurement with serialized-body measurement or turning an independent oracle into the same implementation under test.