The guide said the venv ships in an image. It does not, in either image, and
it does not need to: the engine builds it itself from
requirements-surya.txt onto the persistent cache mount — but only when
ocr.surya_auto_build is true, and it defaults to FALSE (config.py:908).

That default is why the Digesta bring-up built the venv by hand and called
it a packaging gap. It is a one-line config setting on the orchestrator.
Documents the pillow<11 vs >=12 conflict that forces the venv to be
isolated, where it lands, and how to pre-build it instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>