v3.7.0

Since v3.6.0. Full detail below; every claimed symbol was verified to exist in the shipped scripts.

Two behaviour changes to know before upgrading

• render_deck.py no longer writes <deck>.pdf / viewer.html by default — pass --deliverables (alias --final) at hand-off. They went stale the moment the .pptx changed, and a stale PDF is worse than an absent one.
• OLDSTYLE_FIGURES no longer blocks a build; it warns, and the defect is prevented inside the components instead. A build script that wants it fatal asserts over its own finished file.

Added — design components the form catalogue kept prescribing and could not draw

• deckkit.small_multiples — a grid of identical mini native charts on ONE SHARED value axis,
  with an optional hero panel. The cheapest correctness win in the set: data-viz.md and
  form-selection.md both prescribe shared scales, but composing native_chart per panel by hand
  let PowerPoint auto-scale each one, so a small bump and a huge bump rendered identically — a
  silent misreading no geometry lint could see. The regression asserts the axis contract itself.
• deckkit.position_map — N labelled items on two continuous axes, with greedy label
  anti-collision and a ValueError naming any pair it cannot separate. quadrant() returns four
  cells and discards the within-cell position that is usually the whole argument; native_bubble
  drops the labels.
• deckkit.annotated_figure — a real figure + numbered fractional-coordinate markers + a
  numbered caption rail + an optional magnified inset (via Picture.crop_*, no image processing).
  The inset picks the first corner that covers no marker. This is the form the skill's own
  integral-figure philosophy most insists on and least supported.
• deckkit.org_tree — tidy hierarchy layout: post-order centroid placement (the part that stops
  being hand-placeable at depth 3), horizontal bus connectors, and a hard ValueError when it cannot
  fit legibly rather than silently squeezing.
• image_fx.quiet_region(path) — grid luminance-variance scan returning the image's calmest
  single-ink region plus its mean luminance, so title placement and ink colour are measured
  rather than eyeballed. Two fixes found by running it on real photographs: the growth threshold
  anchors on the image's own variance distribution (one flat cell otherwise made every gradient
  neighbour look "busy"), and growth requires luminance coherence — a full-height column spanning
  dark sky and light ground averages to a mid-luminance where neither ink is safe.
• deckkit.design_intent(slide, envelope=, rhyme=, reason=) — the declared-register channel that
  three lint messages already promised ("record the quiet-register exception") with nowhere to record
  it. Stored as an invisible zero-ink tag shape, so intent travels inside the .pptx to the
  render-time lint with no side-channel file. Abuse is audited (INTENT INFLATION).
• deckkit.pic_alpha(picture, pct) — native picture opacity via a:alphaModFix. Against the
  scrim-overlay approach the A/B is unambiguous: the image keeps its own hues instead of being tinted
  toward the scrim colour, and there is no second full-bleed shape.

Added — --fast incremental render

• render_deck.py --fast re-renders only the slides that changed. Profiling an 18-slide deck:
  build 1.8s, LibreOffice→PDF 9.1s, rasterize 24.4s cold. Rasterization, not the PDF export, is the
  larger cost. Measured: 12.3s → 4.7s for a one-slide change, 0.07s when nothing changed;
  outputs byte-identical to a full render.
• Each slide is fingerprinted (its XML + rels + the bytes of the media it references) and mixed with
  a deck-global digest (presentation.xml, theme, masters, layouts). That digest closes a hole
  found by testing: flipping the canvas 16:9→4:3 changes no slide XML, so --fast previously
  reported "no slide changed" and left every PNG at the wrong aspect ratio.
• Correctness over speed throughout — a stale PNG is worse than a slow render, because the lint
  and the visual critic both trust render/*.png to BE the deck. Full-render fallbacks (each with a
  printed reason) for: changed slide count, hidden slides, auto slide-number fields, or no cache.
  Cache writes are atomic and delete the cache on failure.
• Hardened against an adversarial audit (27 candidates → 5 must-fix, all reproduced): hidden slides
  broke the page↔slide mapping on the pre-existing full path too; an unresolvable part hashed to a
  constant so real edits stopped registering; the subset PDF collided between concurrent runs;
  --fast --deliverables exited 0 having produced no PDF (now rejected at parse time); and media
  owned by a layout/master/theme was invisible to the digest.

Added — deck-level design gates (the second design-capability tranche)

• ENVELOPE MONOCULTURE — fires when >60% of interior slides end their content at the same
  height. A deck can vary every form and still read as one template because every page fills the
  same rectangle; this is judged as a distribution, not per slide.
• REGISTRATION DRIFT — consecutive title tops drifting 0.02–0.12in. Identical is calm and a
  deliberate jump is a decision; a sub-visible wobble is neither, and reads as a twitch when
  advancing.
• INHERITED_EFFECT — warns when a shape bypasses the theme-shadow strip (below).
• DEAD BOTTOM's per-slide floor drops 0.62 → 0.45, so only the genuine accident fires; the
  0.45–0.62 band is a legitimate upper envelope and is now judged by the distribution check instead.

Changed — OLDSTYLE_FIGURES is a WARN; the defect is prevented in the components

• v3.6.0 shipped this as a hard build blocker. It is now a WARN, and the defect is prevented at
  the source instead: numeral_run_face() resolves a lining face inside every component that emits a
  figure, so correct output is the default rather than a rule authors must satisfy.
• Why the architecture changed rather than the threshold: a fourth audit round found more
  defects than the third (12 non-minor vs 5), three self-inflicted by the previous fix round. As a
  blocker the rule has an unbounded false-positive surface — every component × every font × every
  string shape — while being structurally blind to where numbers most often live: tables and native
  charts report has_text_frame=False, so their numeric cells and tick labels were never checked at
  all. "7" (a single digit, which cannot bob), "10x" and "H1 2026" were blocked; a cover whose
  title IS a year had no fix available to its author.
• A project that wants it fatal asserts over its own finished file — which is what a build script can
  now do in three lines.

Changed — numeral faces resolve from the deck's design (visible change)

• big_numeral's default face changed. It was hard-coded serif="Georgia"; it now resolves
  through deckkit.numeral_face(), which keeps a lining SERIF (Times New Roman) by default. The
  register is preserved — an oversized italic serif figure, as before — but the digits no longer
  sit at mixed heights. A deck rebuilt from an older build script will render its marker numerals
  in a different face. serif= still overrides, except that an old-style face is substituted
  (lint_layout would reject it).
• stat_row, scorecard, kpi_card and change_stat route their FIGURE runs through the same
  resolver, keeping each component's own default (body font) while guaranteeing lining digits.
  Previously these inherited a body/display face and could hard-fail their own output on a deck
  whose font is Georgia.
• Which faces count as old-style is measured from the installed font rather than read off a
  list; the curated set is only a fallback for fonts the machine does not have.

Changed — the PDF and viewer.html are reserved hand-off deliverables

• They were produced on every render and parked at the deck root. A deck is rebuilt each critic
  round and then usually hand-edited in PowerPoint, so both went stale the moment the .pptx changed —
  and a stale PDF is worse than an absent one, because someone opens it and reviews the wrong deck.
• render_deck.py now takes --deliverables (alias --final), off by default. The PDF still
  exists as a render intermediate inside render/; the flag is what promotes it to the deck root and
  writes the viewer. The default run prints a one-line reminder of how to produce them at hand-off.
  --fast and --deliverables are mutually exclusive, enforced at flag-parse time.

Security — the metered image rung asks before it bills

• The generated-template branch had three rungs (native imagegen → codex CLI → OPENAI_API_KEY)
  governed by one rule: never block on a choice when a working path is present. Right for the two
  subscription rungs, wrong for the third — it treats a present API key as authorisation. On a
  machine with no codex CLI but an exported key, the skill would have started billing per image
  without asking.
• BILLING GATE: rung 3 is metered, an available key is NOT consent, ask before the first paid
  call — a red stop explicitly not waived by a per-deck auto directive (delegation covers
  preferences, never the user's money) — and on a decline fall back to a native look rather than
  spending. agents/asset-prep.md (a subagent brief, which could have spent money with no way to
  ask) and generate_images_codex.py's own failure message are corrected to match.
• Claude Code's real cost is now documented: CC has no native image tool, so the codex CLI IS the
  path there — free on the subscription, one codex login. Q1 probes for a free path before
  offering the branch, so a user cannot pick a look nothing can generate.

Fixed — the inherited theme shadow under every generated shape

• python-pptx stamps <p:style><a:effectRef idx="2"> on every autoshape, connector and freeform,
  resolving to the theme's soft drop shadow. shadow.inherit = False writes an empty <a:effectLst/>
  into spPr — PowerPoint honours that, LibreOffice does not, and LibreOffice is what the render
  loop and the visual critic look at.
• Measured under a plain box: a ~10px grey gradient (185,185,185 → white) under every card, chip,
  callout, tile, node and device frame in every deck this skill has ever produced. It is the
  single artifact that most separates "2010 SmartArt" from flat editorial, and no author could have
  seen it — the XML says there is no shadow. (It also explains an earlier round spent warming a
  frosted tint because panels "read cool grey": the grey was largely this.)
• _flat() removes the element at all 20 shape-creation sites. Deliberate shadows are unaffected
  (offset_shadow, glass_card).

Fixed — a failed render reported as SUCCESS, and four lint false positives

• CRITICAL: _render_pdf returned the expected path and main only checked
  os.path.isfile(), never returncode. With out == the deck folder (where a --deliverables PDF
  legitimately lives) a stale file satisfied that check: the run printed "rendered N slides",
  exited 0, left the old PNGs, and wrote fresh fingerprints — so the next --fast said "no slide
  changed" and the stale render became permanent. Conversion now always targets a private empty temp
  dir, a non-zero exit is fatal, and the out-dir cleanup runs only after the PDF is verified readable.
• The old-style font blacklist was factually wrong. Measured from the installed fonts: Palatino
  digit top-spread 2/100pt, Baskerville 2 — both lining, both wrongly blocked. Replaced the list
  with measurement. (The list had been copied from the skill's own prose without checking it.)
• The gate inverted on CJK: _digit_share divided by raw character count, so "2026 Roadmap"
  scored 0.36 (warn) while "2026 年路线图" scored 0.50 (build failure) — Chinese decks did not get
  the carve-out SKILL.md promises. Now weighted by visual width, with the threshold re-measured into
  the empty gap between word-bearing headings (≤0.40) and real display numerals (≥0.67).
• _font_file shadowing: the numeral resolver was overridden by matplotlib's same-named helper
  later in the module, so "measured" detection actually measured DejaVu for every uninstalled face —
  on a host without Georgia the rule was silently dead.
• Four lint checks were firing on correct design, all reproduced before and after: FOOTER-ZONE
  judged the declared frame instead of the rendered ink; CROWDED counted a hero photograph's area
  as reading density; INVERTED TYPE fired on every interior statement slide (a ≤12-word largest run
  is the hero line, not a broken hierarchy); and OVERLAP flagged small textless markers riding a
  line or ring — composition, not collision, and 13 of one deck's 24 standing findings.
• position_map hero labels are bound to their dot — the hero claims its slot before the greedy
  anti-collision pass, and its label takes the dot's own hue. Found by building a real deck: the hero
  point's label had been nudged next to a different dot and read as that dot's subtitle. Bold alone
  says "important"; it does not say "belongs to THAT one".
• _slide_fingerprints re-hashed shared media once per referencing slide (40-slide deck sharing one
  plate: 318ms → 35ms via part memoization); the subset temp dir leaked on every failure path.

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9 sections · Added · Added · Added · Changed · Changed · Changed · Security · Fixed · Fixed