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.
KeelrLeek
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