FontManager built its catalog from cwd-relative paths ('assets/fonts'),
so any process started outside the install root — the plugin safety
harness on CI being the recurring case — found no fonts and silently
degraded every plugin to PIL's default face. Several plugins grew
per-plugin workarounds for exactly this (countdown, text-display,
tide-display in the plugins monorepo).
Catalog population now falls back to the install root derived from this
module's location when the cwd-relative path is missing; behavior when
running from the install root is unchanged. Verified: resolve_font
returns the real FreeType face from a foreign cwd, and the full unit
suites (266 tests) pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FgbA8SMutQQpXkMG8LMmC4
