v0.6.0: Merge pull request #93 from brianckeegan/claude/eager-dirac-bpke5d

[0.6.0] — 2026-10-26

This release comes out of a full accessibility, consistency, documentation
and performance review, plus a check against current upstream memegen. It
adds alt text for every meme, brings the memegen backend back in line with
the upstream API, ports the MCP server to mcp 2.x and makes it return real
image content, and fixes a set of rendering and CLI rough edges.

Breaking

• MCP meme tool returns image content (#91). The tool now returns an
  MCP image block plus a text block with {"path", "alt_text"}, and the same
  dict as structured content. The base64_png key is gone: read the image
  content block instead.
• The [mcp] extra requires mcp 2.x (#91): mcp>=2,<3 (was
  mcp>=1.0,<2). The server uses MCPServer, mcp 2's rename of FastMCP.
• **text_kwargs under backend="auto" select the matplotlib backend
  (#54), the only one that can apply them. Under an explicit "memegen" or
  "pillow" backend they are ignored with a UserWarning instead of
  silently.
• memegen keeps each template's own font and colors by default (#79,
  #80). memeplotlib no longer sends font= and color= unless you set them,
  so memegen renders match memegen.link.
• Thicker Pillow outlines on large templates (#90). The Pillow stroke
  now scales with font size (font_size * outline_width / 24; the default
  2.0 matches memegen's size / 12) instead of a fixed pixel width.

Added

• Alt text (#69). meme(), memify() and Meme generate a description
  from the template and captions (override with alt_text=). Read it with
  get_alt_text(fig); savefig embeds it as PNG/SVG Description or PDF
  Subject, and the CLI and MCP tool return it.
• memegen API key (#86). Set config["api_key"] or MEMEPLOTLIB_API_KEY
  to send X-API-KEY (only to the configured API base) and remove the
  watermark.
• Template caption geometry (#92). Pillow and matplotlib renders place
  captions in each template's real text boxes for 67 templates whose boxes
  aren't top/bottom (gru, db, woman-cat, ...), from a snapshot of
  upstream config.yml files. scripts/update_template_geometry.py
  regenerates it.
• Per-line overrides for outline_color, outline_width and style on
  Meme.line (#76).
• Full meme() surface in the MCP tool and CLI (#49): lines for 3+
  slot templates and all styling and memegen options.
• Warnings for caption lines with no slot to render into (#55) and for
  captions that can't fit even at the minimum font size (#68).
• TemplateNotFoundError (now a LookupError) and TextPosition are
  exported, and not-found errors suggest how to search (#70).

Fixed

• memegen backend drift from upstream:
  • color= is per line (#80)
  • the font list is current (#79)
  • overlays are comma-joined into one style= (#81)
  • background= renders use the custom template (#84)
  • non-upper caption styles route to Pillow (#85)
  • an underscore followed by a space encodes like upstream (#78)
  • config.* cache artifacts are dropped from Template.styles (#77)
  • animated GIF/WebP responses show their last frame, where every caption
    is visible (#83)
  • renders memegen rejects with 422 fall back to Pillow with a warning (#82)
• Meme forces Pillow for fontsize and outline knobs like meme() does
  (#52), and re-renders after edits instead of reusing a stale figure (#53).
• TemplateCache honors config["cache_dir"] (#51).
• The CLI reports errors on one stderr line, and info resolves through the
  cached catalog (#50).
• The MCP server writes its banner to stderr instead of the JSON-RPC stdout
  channel (#47) and closes the figures each call opens (#48).

Performance

• One HTTP session per thread instead of one per request (#71).
• One process-wide image cache, decoding each download once (#72).
• Cached Pillow font lookup and loading (#73).

Documentation and CI

• Complete config table, descriptive alt text on doc images, a CLI and MCP
  page, a rendering-backends guide, and corrected docstrings (#74, #75, #88).
• ci.yml is lint-only (ruff, black, mypy --strict). The full Python
  3.10–3.13 × Linux/macOS/Windows matrix, docs build and wheel check moved to
  release-tests.yml, which gates every PyPI publish (#26). Image baselines
  are kept for matplotlib >= 3.11 and, under tests/baseline/mpl-pre-3.11/,
  for older matplotlib.