Compact Workstation tourbar controls and clear story fill

Context

During live inspection of the standalone Workstation docking flagship, the operator noticed that the tourbar action buttons visually overpower the story/progress content between them and that the center story carries an opaque background.

Neural Link measurements on a 1280x720 Workstation window reproduced both symptoms:

• .workstation-tour-play and .workstation-theme-button: 48px tall;
• .workstation-tour-story: 26px tall (14px caption + 4px pips + 8px gap);
• center story computed background: rgb(14, 15, 13), while the caption and pips themselves are transparent;
• toggling to the light skin preserves the same 48px/26px geometry and the same dark opaque story fill.

Live latest-open sweep: checked the latest 20 open issues plus an all-state Workstation-tourbar search at 2026-07-14T08:01:13.473Z; no equivalent found. The recent all-state A2A window contains no overlapping lane claim or intent.

The Problem

The tourbar mixes two unrelated generic defaults with the Workstation composition:

1. both buttons inherit the generic --button-height: 48px, making them 22px taller than the complete center story;
2. the story is a Neo.container.Base, so it inherits --container-background-color: #0E0F0D even though Workstation never intends that center strip to be a separate opaque panel.

The result is a short dark slab between two oversized controls. It weakens the flagship header hierarchy, and in light mode the dark inherited fill is especially misleading.

The Architectural Reality

• apps/workstation/view/Workspace.mjs:292 creates one Neo.toolbar.Base with two Neo.button.Base actions around a flexed Neo.container.Base story.
• resources/scss/src/apps/workstation/Workspace.scss:119 owns the standalone tourbar skin and is therefore the narrow owner for both corrections.
• resources/scss/src/apps/workstation/Workspace.scss:129 currently styles the story gap and width but does not override the generic container background.
• test/playwright/e2e/workstation/WorkstationNL.spec.mjs:232 already owns header geometry and palette oracles, so the regression belongs in that existing whitebox journey.

The Fix

1. Give Workstation tourbar buttons a local compact --button-height: 34px, reducing the control/story delta from 22px to 8px without changing Neo's generic button contract.
2. Set .workstation-tour-story to an explicit transparent background so Neo.container.Base cannot leak its skin fill into the composition.
3. Extend the existing Workstation whitebox header oracle to prove compact control geometry and a transparent center story in both dark and light skins.
4. Rebuild the affected themes non-interactively and verify the focused Workstation L3 journey.

Acceptance Criteria

• Both tourbar action buttons compute to 34px tall and remain vertically centered.
• The complete story remains legible and the button/story height delta is no greater than 8px.
• .workstation-tour-story computes to a fully transparent background in dark and light skins.
• Existing no-overlap, label, hover, theme-toggle, and progress behavior remains intact.
• The focused Workstation whitebox E2E journey pins geometry and skin parity.
• Generated theme output is rebuilt through the repository theme builder without interactive prompts.

Out of Scope

Changing generic button or container defaults · resizing the complete 64px tourbar · docking topology or motion behavior · redesigning the tour copy/progress vocabulary.

Avoided Traps

• Do not change Neo.button.Base or Neo.container.Base globally for a standalone app composition.
• Do not paint the center with a Workstation panel token; the intended hierarchy is one continuous tourbar surface.
• Do not use viewport-specific pixel overrides or CSS-in-JS.

Related

• Parent epic: #13158
• Flagship demo: #14589
• Standalone extraction: #15146

Origin Session ID: adddb25d-fc36-4b08-b9a3-3a62a108cda1

Retrieval Hint: Workstation tourbar 48px 26px opaque story container compact button height transparent center