v4.5.0

v4.4.0 made Style a template kind and put a passing quality report in front of every export. This release fills the template library that decision surface selects from — 26 new workspaces across brands, styles, and layouts — and rebuilds how a deck is composed: visualization catalogs split by information model, and structure becomes a composition grammar rather than a list of preset shapes.

Template library

• Fifteen brand identity workspaces. Consulting (mckinsey, bcg, bain, deloitte, pwc, accenture), enterprise technology (microsoft, nvidia, ibm, aws), Chinese technology (huawei, alibaba, tencent, xiaomi), and financial (jpmorgan). Provenance is labelled per value: nvidia and ibm primaries are fact from published guidelines and the open Carbon token set; the other thirteen are approx and say so, because those organizations publish no open brand manual. No workspace bundles a logo — every section IV sets File: none and describes how to install officially supplied artwork. Goldman Sachs and China Merchants Bank were dropped rather than guessed. Each entry also records the practical trap in its palette: Huawei's restrained-accent principle, the near-identical Alibaba and Xiaomi orange, Blue 60 being interactive rather than fill, Microsoft's four quadrants colliding with status semantics, Deloitte and NVIDIA green failing contrast for body text.
• Eleven Style workspaces whose communication methods are orthogonal rather than restyled variants: academic-research, creative-pitch, incident-postmortem, investor-pitch, narrative-keynote, operating-review, product-launch, science-explainer, solution-proposal, technical-deepdive, workshop-teaching. Fallback color is written only where color carries declared semantics; no Style declares fallback typography, which would act as a gravity source pulling unrelated decks toward one family.
• Six layout systems. presentation_core_43 (4:3, 16 prototypes) authored for the narrower field rather than scaled down; report_core (16:9, 13 prototypes, two Masters — the first multi-Master layout, with real footer and slide-number placeholders instead of drawn text); editorial_bleed (16:9, 10 prototypes, every picture slot reaching a canvas edge and no frame at all); xiaohongshu_post (3:4), story_vertical (9:16), and moments_square (1:1) completing the social canvas set. Each was authored for its own canvas: no vertical page splits into side-by-side columns, 9:16 lets pictures cross the interface safe zones text must respect, and 1:1 uses both axes because it is the only canvas where both divide soundly.

Template application

• Each workspace installs as its own spec instead of being fused. Applying several templates used to hand-merge their specs into one templates/design_spec.md — lossy, manually renumbered, and ungoverned. Installed specs are now design_spec.<kind>.<id>.md, each a verbatim copy with one provenance line, so several workspaces of the same kind coexist. Precedence moves from install time to read time.
• An owned segment governs visual weight, not only values. When a segment owner declares that a value should dominate, recede, or stay rare, that carries the same authority as the value itself — the root cause behind two decks where a spec-declared dominant color became an incidental accent.

Composition

• Structure is a grammar, not a catalog. The Structure catalog is replaced by a runtime shape-composition method loaded by both Default and Quick, adding carrier topology, structural punctuation, port states, label tethers, and node-local hierarchy. Published bare keys remain accepted as intent-only compatibility inputs.
• Visualizations split by information model. Charts keep value-driven assets; qualitative topology and cell grids move out, Table is rebuilt around six cell-grid grammars with schedules routed to Gantt, and canonical family indexes carry legacy key aliases. Planning references, Executor branches, native readiness, and chart verification are all object-scoped so mixed pages resolve per object.
• Structural geometry and deck rhythm. A conditional geometry-composition pass with semantic validation, one dominant page scaffold unifying active visual branches, and whole-roster rhythm checks aligned across Default and Quick without new artifacts. Every drawn field, spine, node carrier, and edge must pass a native construction gate — implicit and direct-content roles are distinguished from drawn geometry, with no preset quotas.
• Directional multi-image composition. Each image page decides its direction, contour, slots, and integration once, with vector, baseline, curve-spine, and panel geometry defined for non-grid layouts.

Audio

• Word-timed subtitles for MiniMax, ElevenLabs, and CosyVoice. Provider timings are regrouped with the same punctuation and length rules as Edge into shared compact SRT. Qwen stays audio-only where upstream exposes no timestamps.
• Subtitles live beside their audio, with an atomic manifest that carries provider provenance but no API keys or raw cloud voice IDs, and audio/subtitle output published as a rollback-safe pair.

Quick & workflow

• Quick is a self-contained runtime profile. Source conversion, factual research, source import, and PPTX intake are inlined; Default/Beautify and Quick are mutually exclusive procedures, and the Default workflow no longer loads into Quick prompts. Quick keeps the full capability surface — shared mode/style, native-shape, image, and chart authorities — without substitute planning artifacts.
• Beautify selects one runtime from explicit intent — Quick only when its trigger matches, otherwise Default, skipping confirmation, spec, lock, and Default-only gates in the Quick branch.
• Project-scoped workflow.log. A cold audit trail mirroring project-scoped Python text output, non-authoritative, with detached service output still in component logs.

Fixes & tooling

• UI-free image orientation review. Labeled EXIF-normalized contact sheets for multimodal inspection during source intake, reusing existing batch-fix and analysis commands. GIFs are excluded from contact sheets and mixed fix batches are rejected before mutation.
• SVG quality provenance in the terminal. Blocking, introduced, inherited, and source-import counts now print in the console summary from the same classification the JSON report uses.
• Prompt audit findings are actionable — near duplicates are report-only, reviewed exact duplicates are adjudicated, accepted schema projections bind to stable fingerprints, and Adaptive Layout ownership returns contract changes to Strategist. Budget ceilings were recalibrated to the audited corpus.
• Bundled icons refreshed: Tabler 3.46.0, Phosphor Core 2.1.1, Simple Icons 16.28.0. No bundled icon identifiers were removed.

Full changelog: v4.4.0...v4.5.0