v2.8.1: Summary Report generation ~4× faster

A small follow-up to v2.8.0. Three targeted changes cut Summary Report generation time by roughly 4× on real boards. A report that previously took 35 seconds now finishes in 9.

Released June 2, 2026. Auto-update will deliver v2.8.1 to existing installs over the next few hours.

What changed

None of the wins were exotic. Each was a specific piece of work that had been quietly costing seconds per layer:

• Embedded report images render at a lower cap. Summary Report PNGs were being rendered up to 4096×4096 even though the report displays them at ~400 pixels wide. Dropping the cap to 2048 still gives ~5× retina oversampling and cuts both render and PNG-encode work roughly 4×.
• Faster base64 encoding. The PNG → base64 conversion was doing per-byte string concatenation in a tight loop over multi-megabyte buffers. Replaced with a chunked approach that is typically 10–50× faster on large blobs.
• Auto-alignment is no longer recomputed for every layer. The project-level alignment computed once at load time is now reused during export, instead of running the alignment search again for each selected layer. Same behavior as the on-screen diff, which has always worked this way.

No new features, no UI changes, just a noticeably snappier Export Summary Report on anything more than a couple of layers.