Three cuts to what a chip line spends its cells on.
The seam was two: the previous chip tapering onto the page, the next
notching back out of its own fill, a sliver of bare page between. That gap
was insurance against two neighbours landing on one colour and fusing into a
single block — but the hue wheel is 256 distinct values wide (measured: zero
collisions across all 256 first bytes), so it was insurance against
something that does not happen. One interlocked chevron now, the chip behind
as foreground and the chip ahead as background.
Where two fills really are equal the interlock cannot draw a chevron at all,
and that case is not bad luck: a mirrored return leg is a run of identically
faded hops by construction, and so is a stretch of keyless greys. There the
point drops its background and the page cuts the wedge — still one cell, the
old separation without the old width.
The elision was a chip: pads, a fill, and a seam on each side, seven cells to
say "some hops are missing" on a line that is short of room by definition. It
is not a node called ⋯. It now breaks the ribbon instead — the chip before
closes onto the page, the mark sits there bare, the chip after opens on its
notch. Three cells, and elision_hop() is the one definition the widget and
the mesh walk's trail share. Arrow mode needed no change: a bare label
between two arrows already was a gap.
The you chip was ` ★ ` in dark ink on pure white — five cells shouting the
one node the reader never has to be told. Now the map's own yellow star
(taken from marks.SELF_MARK, so the star in a route and the star on the map
cannot drift) on a neutral dark grey, and padless, because the pads exist to
keep a *word* off the chevrons and a single mark centred in its cell needs no
such room. Three cells.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
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