v4.1.0

One behaviour change to know about before upgrading. render_deck.py --deliverables now also
refuses on DENSITY — more than a third of slides over the text budget stops the hand-off unless
.deck-gates.json carries a written "density": {"waived": "<reason>"}. Scripts that call
--deliverables on text-heavy decks will start failing. Two escapes, both intended: pass the
delivery mode (--selfread / --textheavy / --surface, the same flags lint_deck.py takes) so
the deck is held to its own budget, or record the waiver. Everything else below is additive.

Added — the render decides, not a list of shape types

• TEXT NOT VISIBLE asks the one question with a bounded answer — does this line render any
  glyphs at all? — straight from the pixels. Every previous occlusion rule enumerated causes (this
  shape type, painted then, covering that much), and causes are unbounded: pictures were skipped
  because alpha is unknowable from the file, groups and gradients for their own reasons, and anything
  assembled from many small parts slipped a per-shape threshold. Three real decks shipped through
  those holes with the gate reporting clean.
• OCCLUSION / RULE THROUGH TEXT now measure the UNION of everything painted over a text
  block, so a 150-tile field erasing a caption and a rule assembled from 40 dashes are caught like
  the single shapes they look like.
• CAPTION NOT ALIGNED — a label must sit on the thing it labels. The panels of a composite
  figure have no shape geometry, so captions get laid out on the text grid while the panels sit
  where the plotting library put them, at widths that differ whenever the panels keep their own
  aspect ratios. Read out of the pixels, so it works whether the panels are one composite or a row
  of separate pictures. Ground is estimated per figure crop, not from the page, because a 4% grey
  step between a figure's own paper and the page was enough to make the check disqualify itself.
• A skipped check is audible. With no renders beside the deck the pixel-backed families disable
  themselves and the run says so ([skipped] … NOT checked: …, plus pixel_checks in --json).
  0 findings with that line present is a different sentence from 0 findings without it.
• A CRASHED check is audible too. The per-slide statistics were wrapped in
  except Exception: pass; one refactor took TEXT WALL, LAYOUT SAMENESS, UNDERFILLED, FLAT RHYTHM
  and the body-size floor off every deck while the report still printed ✓ clean. It now prints
  [BROKEN] … NOT checked: … and the suite asserts that line is absent on every fixture deck.

Added — hand-off gates that do not depend on what the user feels like accepting

• DENSITY (above). Calibrated against the skill's own reference deck, which runs at a median of
  27 words a slide — the budget was never the problem. It exists because the per-slide TEXT WALL warning was correct and ignored on two consecutive decks (8/12, then 12/12 over budget).
• render_deck.py <deck>.pptx --gate-check runs every hand-off gate, renders nothing, finishes
  in under a second. The gates used to be reachable only through --deliverables, which Step 6
  deliberately makes a decline-able offer — so on every deck where the user said "no PDF", the
  strongest gate in the skill never ran, and nothing showed that it hadn't.
• The design checkpoint now carries a density: line as two numbers the gate can be compared
  against (planned median load, planned count over 70), so density is decided at plan time instead
  of discovered at lint time.

Fixed — the measurement everything else is built on

• Bold text in font COLLECTIONS (.ttc/.otc) measured at regular width, 3.9% short. Every guard
  built on measure_text silently passed while the text wrapped anyway: a caption sized for one
  line put its second on top of a footer, and the lint agreed with the build because both were
  computed from the same wrong number. Fixed by selecting the right face index inside the
  collection — and CI now renders real strings and compares the ink against the prediction,
  one-sided: the measurement may be conservative, never optimistic.

Changed

• The critic's second round is scoped, and the cost is published. Round 2 was a full fresh
  whole-deck re-review; the measured A/B is in references/critic-panel.md — including a claim from
  an earlier draft that the measurement did not support and that was removed rather than softened.
• A third-party assessment does not wear its subject's livery. The LOGO PRINCIPLE situation
  table gained the row for decks that evaluate an entity rather than speak for one.
• SEARCH BUDGET. Web search is capped per SESSION and shared with every subagent; one research
  fan-out (12 agents + 7 verifiers, none told a cap existed) spent all 200, and the bill arrived
  hours later when a single lookup for a company's official logo could not run. Small NAMED lookups
  go first, each dispatch states a per-agent cap, the round stays under half of what REMAINS (not
  half the cap — the budget does not reset between decks), and searches: planned/spent reaches the
  hand-off cost: line. Stated where the fan-out is DISPATCHED, not 1000 lines later.

CI / repository

• The credential scanner was excluded from the repo by the very pattern it scans for (*_secret*);
  check_repo_integrity.py now fails the build on any ignored source file or untracked CI path.
• The regression suite ran ABOVE pip install, so every run died on a bare ModuleNotFoundError
  that reads exactly like a lint regression. Moved after the installs, with an audible-skip backstop
  so a silently skipped suite cannot pass.
• Both READMEs realigned with the shipped skill.

Verification

22 regression assertions (from 18), two-sided: a PASS corpus that must stay clean, a FAIL corpus
where every defect must be caught, and the skill's own reference deck held at baseline. The lint
changes in this release were then attacked by an adversarial audit that required a runnable repro
for every claim — 20 raised, 5 confirmed, all 5 fixed here, including two claims in earlier commit
messages that the audit proved false.