ChromIQ v4.1.5-beta.8

Auto align worked on 8 of the 25 bundled scanner targets. It now works on all
25 — and the reason it failed was in files we ship, not in the recogniser.
Knut reported that auto align did not work on his charts. Basti then found it
did not work on the test file ChromIQ ships with the app. Chasing that one
report opened the whole scanner path, and most of this release comes out of it:
an under-exposed scan that quietly built a bad profile and then rated it best,
a hand-held scan tilted ten degrees accepted as correctly placed, and a
diagnostic image that drew no outline, so a correct read looked wrong. Several
of these had been shipping for months.

Fixed — the scanner path

• Auto align could never work on a bought target. Every bundled .cht
  carried an absolute edge length in a column that ArgyllCMS reads as strength
  relative to the strongest feature, where the strongest must be 1.0 — 385.125
  in one file, 3600.0 in another. scanin scored every candidate rotation as
  nan and refused the match before looking at the picture. Normalised in
  place; the geometry Knut supplied is untouched. 8 of 25 targets aligned
  before, 25 of 25 now.
• An under-exposed scan built a profile with no warning, and the app rated it
  best. The scan is now judged before it is trusted, and a scan too dark to
  profile from says so instead of producing a plausible, wrong profile.
• A ten-degree hand-held tilt was accepted as a correct placement. Keystone
  is now measured against a limit rather than assumed away: 328 correct
  placements separate cleanly from 106 wrong ones.
• Auto align found the right answer and threw it away. An accepted result
  was extrapolated to the fiducials a second time, moving it back off the
  patches.
• Auto align and "Fit to the patches" are one button. Measured over 290
  cells: neither was a subset of the other — 139 cases only the search
  recovered, 30 only the reshaping did, and "Fit" applied a placement that was
  still wrong in 41 of the 118 cases it acted on. Auto align now searches,
  reshapes, and only then submits the result to both picture checks and the
  reference agreement. 68 % → 84 % of placements land on the patches, and
  nothing wrong is applied.
• The alignment diagnostic drew no outline, so a correct read looked
  misaligned; zooming it interpolated away the very edges being judged; and a
  refusal could not be diagnosed from the log. All three now say what happened.
• A scan that is not the target you chose, an unreadable reference, and a
  scanin diagnostic image loaded as a scan each said nothing, or blamed the
  wrong thing. Each now names what it found.
• The profile self-check had no floor and no NaN guard.

Fixed — elsewhere

• A project whose name ends in an underscore and digits silently lost its
  exports.
• The ICC filename and the description embedded inside it disagreed when no
  description was given.
• "Build anyway" was drawn as "uild anywa" — three windows built their own
  buttons and never called the helper that has fitted them since #130.
• Four instruction labels were painted in the one colour that cannot carry a
  word: 1.25:1 in Light, 1.02:1 in Dark, against the 4.5:1 that AA asks for.
  Now 13.6:1, 5.1:1 and 12.1:1.
• A self-capturing lambda on the pop-out window's finished signal — the
  same shape that crashed the app through the scroll-bar fade and is now
  guarded there. Replaced with a bound method.

Changed

• Every warning, information and question sign in the app is ChromIQ's own.
  The platform's signs were still showing in 70 places across 13 files. All
  three signs are drawn for Light, Dark and Neutral, and Neutral stays hueless.
• Explanation has left the Create Chart sections for the ⓘ it belongs to.
  Four blocks of standing text that sat inside sections now ride on the
  information icon of the control they describe, with the first line also in the
  hover tooltip so an icon carrying something says so without being clicked.
  246 px of vertical space returned in English, 262 in German, and the panel
  did not get wider in any of the thirteen languages.
• The six buttons under the scanner preview read in three rows instead of
  four, grouped by what each one acts on. The preview itself now takes the
  space the window gives it — it was pinned to its 460 px minimum however large
  the window grew, handing the rest to an empty spacer.

For developers

• The 34-check scanner-window sweep lives in the repository, runs as
  ./run-sweep.sh, and drives the real window end to end rather than a harness.
• docs/beta8_open_items.md is a register the test suite enforces. A fix
  called FIXED must name a test that exists; a deferred item must name who
  decided it and why; and the release gate refuses to go green while anything
  marked as blocking release is still open.

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Installation (Linux, beta): Download the tarball for your architecture (x86_64 for most desktops/laptops, aarch64 for ARM systems like Raspberry Pi 4/5). Extract with tar xzf ChromIQ-Linux-*.tar.gz, then run ./ChromIQ/ChromIQ. Requires ArgyllCMS — install via your package manager (sudo apt install argyll) or from argyllcms.com/downloadlinux.html.

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☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.