Five changes to the mask the tracer receives, plus the diagnostic needed to
tell them apart.
The alpha ramp's bottom now scales with the measured ink distance instead of
sitting at a fixed 46. On a faint mark that constant ate the outer half of
every edge gradient -- Wand's "Machine Man / M.E." inks at distance 97, so the
pixel carrying ~20% coverage was forced fully transparent and the boundary
quantised to whole source pixels. The finished alpha is then rescaled so the
glyph body reaches opacity, bounded at 4x; narrowing the ramp onto the ink was
tried instead and let paper grain bite the edges.
A BLIND OCR read (zero lines, not "no match") retries once at 512px. Windows
OCR is scale-sensitive on large display type and reads that cover at 512 and
at no other size; gating on blindness rather than on no-match kept a 21-artist
regeneration at 1m47s where the looser gate took ~6min.
The winning cover is re-cut with the crop resampled up BEFORE the alpha ramp,
so smoothstep evaluates interpolated colour and places the edge between source
pixels. Selection still runs at native scale: extract_wordmark feeds MIN_MARK_H
and the aa/coverage/bleed score, so supersampling during scoring changes which
cover wins.
That scale is fractional. A floored integer factor is 1 for every crop wider
than half the target, so at 2400 a crop of 1201px was supersampled by nothing
at all while 1200px got 2x -- and the covers on the wrong side of that cliff
are the large printed wordmarks, where the staircase was worst. Measured over
eight artists, Hot Toddy's zigzag share fell 0.312 -> 0.048 and Crazy P's
0.220 -> 0.021, with every other artist unchanged. 2400 itself is confirmed by
sweeping 1200/3600/4800: past 2400 the mask overshoots the tracer's raster so
the browser downscales what Rust just built, every shape measure goes flat and
the data URL doubles.
catalog_cover_logo_debug reports the rejection reason and the mask itself, and
its cover cap follows COVER_LOGO_MAX_COVERS instead of undercutting it at 14 --
where it hid exactly the covers production relies on. The artist page also
re-runs the logo pass when ownership changes the covers on offer; that pass
races the identity merge and had been reading the unfiltered list, which is how
Wand wore a wordmark lifted from a co-tenant's single.
The extractor trimmed the crop VERTICALLY to the wordmark's true edge, walking
rows until a transparent gap. Horizontally it did nothing: left and right were
the OCR box plus a pad of 5% of the word's width. Three defects fell out of that
asymmetry, all measurable as ink touching the finished mask's boundary.
- Glyphs were sliced when the OCR box under-covered them. Snail Mail's italic
"L" was cut down the middle: 87 of 163 rows inked at the right edge. Padding
now scales with TYPE SIZE rather than word length, because an overhang is
proportional to letter height and a long wordmark was getting the least room.
- Cover frames were swallowed when the box sat near an edge. Knocked Loose's
mask had ink down its entire left column and across its entire top -- a
border, not letters.
- Artwork BESIDE the text bridged the row walk. A decorative shape down the left
of "Lamb's Wool (with Poolside)" kept every row between the two text lines
non-empty, so the walk sailed through the gap and took the line above with it:
the mask read "WITH / POOLSIDE". Row ink is now tallied over the artist name's
own columns, where that gap is genuinely empty.
The column walk mirrors the row one exactly: outward from the name's columns
while ink stays contiguous, stopping at the first transparent column (so the
wider pad can never reach a neighbouring word) and at a near-fully-inked one
(a rule or frame, the same boundary `solid` already recognises for rows).
Candidate scoring gains a bleed penalty, because trimming alone made selection
WORSE. A clean mark ends with empty borders, so ink still touching one means
cover art is continuous with the text -- and that art is soft grey, which the
`aa` term reads as superb edge quality: Folamour's smeared 246x89 candidate
scores 0.44 against the clean 647x124's 0.03, and won. Penalising boundary ink
puts the clean one back in front.
Measured over the fixture roster: Knocked Loose 920x151 -> 872x88 with no frame,
Snail Mail's L intact, Poolside a clean "POOLSIDE" instead of "WITH / POOLSIDE",
Folamour back to 647x124. Camping in Alaska, Crazy P, Mildlife, Session Victim,
Turnover, Alvvays, Motor City Drum Ensemble, Spiritbox and Todd Terje all still
extract, each a little tighter now that the slack is trimmed.
Both regressions were invisible because the pipeline's failure mode is a shrug:
no logo, no error, fall back to plain text.
1. The dominance guard was resolution-dependent. It bins the crop into a coarse
16-cubed RGB histogram and rejects when the dominant colour holds under half
the pixels ("text over a photo"). A BIGGER source resolves more grain and
JPEG texture, which spreads pixels across bins and shrinks that share -- so
the identical crop of Alvvays' "Blue Rev" measures dominance 0.746 at 1000px
and 0.226 at 3000px. Once the upgrade path started supplying hi-res artwork,
covers that had segmented cleanly for months began failing a guard that had
not changed; its input grew. The histogram and guard now read a copy
normalised to the 1000px they were calibrated at, while the alpha ramp still
runs at full resolution -- which is the whole reason for fetching the larger
cover.
2. Only the top 14 covers were ever offered. The rank puts albums first and
penalises remix/mix/edit/live titles, but a prolific artist's wordmark is
often on exactly those: Poolside has 74 releases and SEVEN covers that OCR
reads as "POOLSIDE", every one of them outside a 14-cover window. The cap
goes to 40 on both sides (the frontend list must not undercut the backend's,
since whatever it trims the extractor can never see). This is free for
artists that hit early -- the locate loop stops at COVER_LOGO_MAX_HITS -- and
is paid once, then cached, by artists with no wordmark at all.
Recovered: Alvvays (nothing -> 871x173), Poolside (nothing -> 528x225),
Men I Trust, and Motor City Drum Ensemble now extracts too. Verified no
regression across the rest of the research roster: Camping in Alaska, Crazy P,
Folamour, Hot Toddy, Mildlife, Session Victim, Turnover, Knocked Loose,
Snail Mail, Spiritbox and Todd Terje all still extract at their previous sizes.
The wordmark segmentation mapped alpha with smoothstep(46, 120) over distance
from the background colour. That ceiling is fixed, but the ink distance is not:
white text on a black band sits at ~438, so every edge pixel brighter than about
27% grey saturated to fully opaque. A hard threshold wearing a smoothstep's
clothing. Measured on Camping in Alaska's "Needlemouth" cover, the extracted
mask's edges transitioned over 0.10px against the source's 0.88px -- nine times
harder than the artwork it came from.
The ramp's top now tracks the measured ink distance (95th percentile of
distance-from-background, so it reads the glyph body rather than the brightest
speck), with the old constant kept as a floor so low-contrast marks are
untouched. Retained anti-aliasing on that cover goes from 10.4% of inked pixels
to 22.2%, and the glyphs thin back toward the source instead of being dilated by
the saturation.
That unlocks the trace side, which is the visible half. The blur there was never
a goal -- it exists to synthesise anti-aliasing a mask lacks, and it melts serif
terminals into blobs. With real gradients in the alpha, the cover-logo branch
drops from ~0.93px of blur to a 0.5px floor and from eps 0.5 to 0.2, at a 2400px
raster instead of 1400. Lowering eps ALONE was tried and rejected: against the
old near-binary mask it just captured the pixel staircase in finer detail.
Camping in Alaska's traced path goes 900 -> ~2500 vertices with no staircasing,
and the serif terminals keep their shape. Cost is 35ms -> 65ms of main-thread
work, once per cover-derived logo at page load, not per frame.
The previous .git directory was found gutted (only info/ remained), so
history is unrecoverable locally. This commit restores version control
with the tree exactly as it stands: the working app, the preview-tracks
launcher on the artist hero, the scrollable-track-previews design bundle
(docs + approved mockups), and the Phase 0 validation artifacts.
KeelrLeek