[ChuckBuilds]

Eight manifests on main contained raw UTF-8: em dashes, plus baseball's up/down arrows. Every other manifest stores such characters as JSON \uXXXX escapes. This PR converts the eight to escapes and adds a guard so it doesn't happen again. Nothing on the display changes.

Why it matters

Anything that opens manifest.json without encoding= uses the platform's default encoding, which is cp1252 on Windows. That includes LEDMatrix cores before v3.4.0 (load_manifest, used by check_plugin.py) and the core's scripts/dev_server.py on main today. Under cp1252:

• Most characters garble silently. An em dash reads as —.
• Some abort the read. A character whose UTF-8 includes a byte cp1252 leaves undefined (81, 8D, 8F, 90, 9D) raises UnicodeDecodeError. A closing curly quote, U+201D, is one.

This has already happened: on-air's description and odds-ticker's 1.1.7 notes carry escaped mojibake (\u00e2\u20ac\u201d) from an earlier round trip. That repair is separate work.

Changes

• The eight manifests: clock-simple, ledmatrix-weather, pomodoro-timer, and the baseball, basketball, football, lacrosse and soccer scoreboards. The scoreboard ones came in with scoreboards: require core 3.6.1; drop the bundled favourite-check and timezone code (stage 2 sunset) #570/soccer: use core's favourite-team check (2.37.0, requires core 3.6.2) #571. Each non-ASCII character becomes its JSON escape, with surrogate pairs above the BMP.

  • The substitution is text-level, so formatting, key order and line endings are unchanged. Each diff is one changed line per affected note, plus the version bump.
  • json.loads(before) == json.loads(after) was asserted for every file.

• Versions: each plugin gets a PATCH bump with a new top versions[] entry. ledmatrix_min_version is copied from the previous top entry, and the notes explain the change. plugins.json was synced with update_registry.py.

  Plugin	Version
  clock-simple	1.1.3
  ledmatrix-weather	2.7.9
  pomodoro-timer	1.3.9
  basketball-scoreboard	1.40.1
  football-scoreboard	3.17.1
  lacrosse-scoreboard	1.35.1
  soccer-scoreboard	2.38.1
  baseball-scoreboard	1.53.1

• scripts/check_manifests_ascii.py (new guard): reads each plugins/*/manifest.json as raw bytes. It prints a FAIL line for every non-ASCII character, giving the line, column and escape to write. It also reports a BOM or a byte that isn't valid UTF-8. It fails if it finds fewer than 41 manifests, so a moved tree can't pass by finding nothing. Exit codes: 0 pass, 1 fail.

• scripts/test_check_manifests_ascii.py (regression suite, 27 checks): runs the guard over the real tree, which is how CI's scripts/test_*.py glob enforces it. It also covers:

  • raw BMP and astral characters
  • BOM
  • cp1252-saved bytes
  • U+0085/U+2028/U+2029, which str.splitlines() would treat as line breaks
  • files other than manifest.json being ignored
  • the plausibility floor
  • that the suggested escapes parse back to the same text

Test plan

• python scripts/check_manifests_ascii.py: PASS on this branch (46 manifests). Run against unfixed main, it lists all eight files by line and column.
• python scripts/test_check_manifests_ascii.py: all 27 checks pass.
• python update_registry.py --check: PASS.
• python scripts/check_version_bump.py --base origin/main <the 8 ids>: all PASS.
• python scripts/check_manifest_version_fields.py <the 8 ids>: OK.
• The eight manifests validate against core main's schema/manifest_schema.json.
• test_check_version_bump.py, test_update_registry.py, test_check_manifest_version_fields.py: pass.
• Render harness: not run. Only manifest notes and version fields changed.

Notes for reviewer

• Weather's registry entry on main read "2.7.8\r". Regenerating it clears the stray CR, which also appears in ten other latest_version values (from Remove code nothing calls (20 plugins) #560). A separate change fixes the rest and teaches update_registry.py --check to catch it, so that PR may conflict on the weather line.
• Any open PR that bumps one of these five scoreboards will conflict on version.

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