designcraft/ROADMAP.md

DesignCraft roadmap

Stage: pre-alpha · next: alpha, ~5–7 h away; beta ~28 points and ~420–750 h beyond that (the core-workflow gate, not the percentage: ready for real work is already ~47%)

Last reviewed: 2026-10-11 · Last updated: 2026-10-12 · Change: minor (text threads by hand; the alpha gate waits on Primary Text Frame page fixes; Japanese print, import and table controls localized; Live corners (#186); Optical kerning from outlines (#181); window and menu quit confirmation; failed writes preserve live save and collection state; spring-loaded Zoom navigation; orderly native exit recovery) · Target: Adobe InDesign 2026

DesignCraft aims at full Adobe InDesign parity, and to be better: faster, open (documented JSON format + IDML), scriptable by agents (MCP), and available on the web.

Headline numbers

	Value	Kind
Feature breadth	~80% (69% of InDesign 21.6's in-scope menu items matched; 99% of our 275-row checklist)	measured bounds, estimate between
Ready for real work	~47% (range 42–52%)	estimated: weighted sum over the dimensions below
Mainstream practitioner	~42% (weekly core 60.7% × 0.88 interaction × 0.92 stability × 0.85 file exchange)	estimated
Essentials user	~54% (core features 72% × 0.90 launch × 0.88 discoverability × 0.95 files received)	estimated
Remaining to beta	420–750 Opus 5.5 agent-hours (~120–200 wall-clock hours with 4–5 agents)	estimated
Remaining to full parity	1,150–1,950 Opus 5.5 agent-hours	estimated

Audience	Ready	Opus 5.5 agent-hours to ~95%	Work that dominates
Full target (ready for real work)	~47%	1,150–1,950 (~70% parallel)	depth across all areas, scripting compatibility, localization, typography fidelity, INDD/IDML
Mainstream practitioner	~42%	500–850 (~65% parallel)	INDD import and IDML corpus, composition fidelity, weekly-area depth, PDF/X-1a and printing
Essentials user	~54%	135–250 (~50% parallel)	start-up robustness, context menus and copy/paste, threading, fonts, Windows printing

Why pre-alpha: it fails one of InDesign's core workflows, the alpha gate in docs/roadmap.md. Text threads by hand (click a port, then click or draw a frame; thread and unthread commands), but Primary Text Frame autoflow adds pages users can't delete (#165). Everything else in the gate works end to end on macOS (document setup, styles, images, object editing, PDF export, save and reopen), and ready for real work (~47%) is above the alpha bar, so the Primary Text Frame page fixes are the whole distance to alpha. Beyond that, beta needs INDD opening, IDML proven on real files, composition compared with InDesign's, and basic editing fixed on Windows and Linux. Details: docs/target-app-parity.md.

By dimension

Dimension	Ready	Hours	Doc
Features (depth)	55%	250–400	target-app-parity.md
Typography and composition fidelity	45%	120–200	typography-parity.md
File formats	40%	150–250 + 20–60 (INDD)	file-format-parity.md
UI/UX fidelity	45%	120–180	ui-parity.md
Stability	45%	60–100	gaps.md
Performance	65%	40–80	gaps.md
Localization	45%	120–180	localization-parity.md
Platforms	55%	40–80	hardware-parity.md
Hardware	45%	20–40	hardware-parity.md
Ecosystem (scripting, plug-ins)	15%	150–250	gaps.md
AI features	15%	60–120	gaps.md

All "Ready" figures are estimates; the weights and evidence are in target-app-parity.md.

Features

Breadth from docs/parity-checklist.md (cargo xtask parity, measured); Ready estimated.

Area	Breadth	Ready	Hours
Application shell & workspace	99%	55%	40–60
Documents, pages, spreads	100%	65%	20–35
Layers	100%	75%	5–10
Frames, shapes & paths	100%	60%	25–40
Transform	100%	70%	10–20
Fill, stroke, colour	100%	60%	20–35
Effects & transparency	100%	50%	20–30
Placing & links	93%	55%	20–35
Type & text frames	99%	45%	40–60
Typography	100%	45%	see typography-parity.md
Styles	100%	60%	15–25
Tables	100%	55%	25–40
Long documents	100%	45%	30–50
Interactivity & digital	100%	40%	30–50
Output & production	92%	55%	40–70
XML & automation	100%	35%	see Ecosystem
View & navigation	100%	65%	10–20
Undo, history, saving	100%	70%	5–10
Accessibility	100%	50%	15–25

Languages

Interface strings translated, of 1,724 measured. Detail: docs/localization-parity.md.

Language	Code	Status	Translated
English	en	full	100%
Simplified Chinese	zh	partial (no canvas IME)	83%
Spanish	es	partial	83%
Hindi	hi	none	0%
Arabic	ar	partial (RTL UI and composition)	85%
French	fr	partial	83%
Portuguese (Brazil)	pt-br	partial	61%
Indonesian	id	none	0%
Japanese	ja	partial (no canvas IME)	95%
German	de	partial	83%
Korean	ko	none	0%
Vietnamese	vi	none	0%

Also shipped: Czech (99%), Italian (85%), Ukrainian (83%).

Upcoming

Ranked; detail and estimates in docs/roadmap.md, the full list in docs/gaps.md.

1. Alpha gate: Primary Text Frame page fixes: autoflow adds pages users can't delete (#165) (5–7 h)
2. Basic editing on every platform: copy/paste, context menus, caret formatting (30–50 h)
3. CI running cargo xtask ci on pull requests (4–8 h)
4. Open INDD through a clean-room converter, owner decision on #114 (20–60 h)
5. IDML real-file corpus and fixes (60–100 h)
6. Composition oracle against InDesign; optical kerning tuning; overset rule (70–125 h)
7. Start on any GPU; find every installed font (25–50 h)

Documents

target-app-parity.md (assessment) · gaps.md (work list) · roadmap.md (milestones, plan) · parity-checklist.md (presence checklist) · typography-parity.md · file-format-parity.md · ui-parity.md · hardware-parity.md · localization-parity.md · architecture.md · agents: agents.md, mcp.md, control-protocol.md · CJK: cjk.md, cjk-typography.md · Arabic: arabic-typography.md

Progress log

Newest first.

• 2026-10-12 · With the Type tool, dragging a table's column or row border resizes it (the double-arrow cursor shows over a border): later columns and rows move along, Shift keeps the table size, and Shift on the right or bottom edge scales every column or row. A dragged row becomes At Least; one undo step per drag, Esc cancels; works in rotated frames and turned spreads. Scripts use table.resizeBorder. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · The Tools panel's Fill/Stroke keys work: D (default fill and stroke), X (fill or stroke in front), Shift+X (swap per object, tints included) and / (Apply None), as color.* commands; swap and default are one undo step (object.swapFillStroke, object.defaultFillStroke); the Color panel follows the proxy's fill/stroke choice. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · With a placed graphic selected (Direct Selection), the Transform values act on the graphic inside its frame, as in InDesign: a tilted frame's image can be straightened to 0°. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Font menu laid out like InDesign's: filters (classification, favourites, recently added), families opening to their styles, the selected text as the sample in three sizes, Recently Used fonts, Show Similar Fonts and each font's format.
• 2026-10-12 · The Effects panel shows the level its settings apply to ("Group: Color Dodge 100%") and, as in InDesign, Isolate Blending and Knockout Group for a selected group. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Edit › Step and Repeat has its InDesign dialog: Repeat (Count, or Rows and Columns with Create as a grid), Offset (Vertical, Horizontal, in ruler units) and Preview, which shows the copies while the dialog is open; Cancel takes them away and OK makes them as one undo step. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Load Styles: the Paragraph Styles and Character Styles panels load styles from another DesignCraft document or an IDML file, with the styles, swatches and lists they name; a dialog picks the styles and what happens to one the document defines differently (style.load). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · On screen, blend modes blend with the objects below and not with the paper, as in InDesign and in PDF export: a Color Dodge or Screen object over blank paper shows as it is. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Text threads by hand: click a selected text frame's in or out port to load the text cursor, then click a frame to thread it, click empty space for a column-wide frame or drag one (it snaps like frame drawing); Shift-click autoflows, Alt-click stays loaded on the frame just added; click the linked frame or double-click a port to break the thread. text.thread, text.unthread, text.removeFromThread with undo; locked frames and layers refuse threads. The alpha gate now waits only on the Primary Text Frame page fixes (#165). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Properties › Transform shows rotation, shear and X/Y scale, and Rotate 90° and Flip Horizontal/Vertical buttons, as InDesign's does. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Underlines and strikethroughs are drawn as one bar per stretch of text on screen, as in PDF export: a bar per letter left faint seams between the letters. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · The section marker character shows its section's marker text on document pages (nothing when the section has none) instead of the word "Section", which stays on parent pages; editing the marker recomposes (#556). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · IDML import keeps a font family name exactly as written, trailing spaces included, and font lookup falls back to the name without surrounding spaces; FontStyle="Nothing" leaves the style to the paragraph (#558). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Clipping paths saved with images in IDML (Detect Edges, Alpha Channel, Photoshop Path, User-Modified Path, inverted or not) clip the image on screen and in PDF and survive IDML export; object.clippingPathOptions reports, inverts or removes one (#450). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Anchored objects with text wrap push text aside: other stories' text under them and the lines of their own story after the anchor's line (#557). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Hyphenation Zone applies to the Single-line Composer only, as in InDesign. With the default Paragraph Composer, ragged text hyphenates where InDesign does (aper-natem), giving the same line breaks. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Text frame auto-size: Height Only, Width Only, Height and Width (also keeping proportions) frames grow and shrink to fit their text after edits and IDML import, around their reference point, with minimum sizes and No Line Breaks, in the same undo step (#180). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Orderly native exit writes the latest recovery state after finalizing current quit approvals; incomplete or stale plans keep their documents, and Undo to the saved state clears stale recovery. Unavailable or failed recovery is reported. Cancelable macOS Dock Quit remains open (#544). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Windows: dragging the window across monitors with different display scales keeps its size instead of growing until it crashes (winit pinned to its 0.30.x backport of the fix). The GPU surface may be as large as the adapter's largest texture (16384 px on DirectX 12, Vulkan and Metal hardware) instead of 8192, and a wgpu error is logged instead of closing the app. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Recovered documents keep a checkpoint until saved, closed or reverted, including a second crash before autosave. Restarted document IDs and explicit recovery folders preserve other snapshots; failed republishing retains the original. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Book numbering and style updates prepare every chapter before saving. Only closed native chapters are changed; imported IDML remains a read-only style/PDF source. If a later disk write fails, the error names the completed chapters; the batch is not a whole-book transaction. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Desktop write callbacks and CLI raster exports use the atomic writer too; open readers retain the original bytes, while private Unix modes and symlink targets survive replacement. Permanent tests cover both actual callers. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Save As, library edits and book collection edits persist prospective values before changing live state; failed writes preserve the document and existing collections. Save a Copy rebases data-source paths for its destination without changing the open document. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Window close and application/menu Quit ask about unsaved documents; later Cancel keeps every tab open, including earlier Don't Save choices. Approvals are rechecked after edits. Cancelable macOS Dock Quit remains open (#544). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Each running app keeps recovery data in its own locked folder; current folder and lock ownership are checked before writes and cleanup. Failed isolation disables recovery with a warning instead of sharing document IDs. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Native engine saves and exports replace files atomically; failed writes retain the original, private staging preserves Unix permissions, and valid long filenames work. Desktop Services and CLI raster exports remain separate follow-ups. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Document chapter numbering (#341): style, automatic, start at, same as previous document in the book; Update Numbering resolves it in book order.
• 2026-10-11 · Advanced workspace's object Control panel compacted into aligned two-row groups (#255): spinners, fill/stroke chips, proportion links, corners, Auto-Fit, alignment.
• 2026-10-12 · A gradient feather on a group fades the group as one, on screen and in PDF. Before, the screen ignored it, and PDF masked the group with a box of zero size because a group has no path of its own. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · The Eyedropper samples a placed image: clicking the photo with text (or objects) selected fills them with the image's colour under the pointer, as an unnamed colour (color.sample), as in InDesign. Images on locked layers can be sampled. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Double-clicking a frame handle fits the frame to its content as in InDesign (a corner fits both sides, an edge only its own). Object › Fitting › Fit Frame to Content now fits text frames to their text too, growing them for overset text. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Words in capitals hyphenate like capitalized words (FERRUM COM-MODI), as in InDesign; Hyphenate Capitalized Words off keeps them whole. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-12 · Load Swatches refuses an .ase file with more than 100,000 colors, and swatch.load merges a file of 100,000 colors in under 0.1 s (it took 9.6 s of CPU in a test build). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 (printing): file.printers and file.print use craft-libs/craft-print for CUPS and Windows. DesignCraft retains PDF export, page selection, spreads, marks and bleed; dry runs create no temporary PDF or print job. Windows selects matching or default driver paper and shrinks oversized sheets without enlarging smaller ones; queue duplex defaults are preserved. Headless tests exercise exported bytes, job settings, dry runs and refusals; shared native Windows CI passes, including paused-queue submission and cleanup. PostScript, production print controls and physical output validation remain open. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · The View menu follows InDesign's: proofing first, then zoom, Rotate Spread, Screen Mode, Display Performance, rulers, Extras, Grids & Guides and Structure; the view items that sat at the end of the Type menu moved there. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Properties › Appearance's Fill and Stroke menus gain InDesign's Tint field and, for a text frame, Apply To: Frame / Text. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · story.replaceRange, story.setText, notes, footnotes, endnotes, type on a path and table cells read \r and \r\n as paragraph returns, as frame.create and text.insert already did. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Corner Options keep curved sides curved and round every corner point, including where an arc meets a line (a Pathfinder quarter circle with rounded corners stayed a triangle). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11: Type › Justification… (Cmd+Alt+Shift+J, also in the Paragraph panel menu) sets word and letter spacing, glyph scaling and the composer on the selected paragraphs, sharing the Paragraph Style Options section (#531). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Properties gains InDesign's Pathfinder section (Add, Subtract, Intersect, Exclude Overlap, Minus Back) with several objects selected; section titles and icon buttons have accessible names. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · transform.move {copy}, Edit › Duplicate and Step and Repeat return the copies' ids, so a script can go on with them. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · object.fill and object.stroke refuse a swatch name the document doesn't have (it painted nothing) and suggest the name meant (Paper → [Paper]). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Japanese captions now cover print ranges, imported style handling and table row/column movement, including row-height distribution. Existing translation and RTL helpers handle the display; command IDs, stored option values and user-defined style names are unchanged.
• 2026-10-11 · Moving a sheared and rotated text frame no longer leaves trails of text behind: canvas repaints cover the frame's whole text box, not just its outline. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Live corners: the yellow widget on a selected rectangle frame shows corner diamonds; dragging one rounds the corners, Alt-click steps the corner shape (#186).
• 2026-10-11 · Optical kerning (#181): pairs are spaced from their outlines (ink gap per band, pulled towards the font's stem gap, bounded) instead of silently using the font's kern pairs.
• 2026-10-11 · New Document laid out like InDesign's (#325): Recent, Saved, Print, Web and Mobile preset tabs beside the preset's details; saved document presets live in the engine (file.savePreset, file.deletePreset, file.new {preset}); file.new takes intent, units, start page and per-edge bleed and slug.
• 2026-10-11 · macOS: fonts that font services and managers activate (Adobe Fonts, RightFont) are listed, read from the files CoreText has available (#261, #327).
• 2026-10-11: Document pages take their parent page's margins and columns (left or right parent page by side) and follow its changes unless they have their own; parent ruler guides draw and snap on the pages based on it. IDML import marks a page margin preference that differs from its parent as the page's own. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 · Document Setup laid out like InDesign's: Page Size, Margins (new: every page's, layout.documentSetup {margins}), Bleed and Slug with links, Adjust Layout.
• 2026-10-11 · IDML reads and writes a spread's view rotation (Rotate Spread) as the rotation part of the spread transform (#484).
• 2026-10-11 · The document grid is drawn (View ▸ Grids & Guides ▸ Show/Hide Document Grid, ⌘'), on the lines Snap to Document Grid uses, behind or in front of page items (#530).
• 2026-10-12 · Double-clicking the Fill or Stroke box in the Tools panel opens the Color Picker with the selection's colour, as in InDesign (it opened the Swatches panel). No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-11 (DC-1): Hold Cmd+Space for the Zoom cursor and click/scrubby zoom, with Alt-click to zoom out. Releasing restores the selected tool; text editing and existing tool drags retain their input. Space remains Hand, and navigation changes neither the document nor undo history. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-10 (UI.4–UI.5): Panel tabs can move into other groups, split the dock, float, resize and return to their saved locations through shared docking transactions. Layouts persist in custom workspaces; UI and control commands share the same validated action path. Shared pane geometry and widget-state theme application retain all five palettes and local fonts. Split panes send keyboard input only to the focused canvas and scope contextual toolbar IDs per pane. No readiness percentage change.
• 2026-10-10 · Version 0.6.0; releases add a Linux riscv64 tar.gz (cross-compiled, CLI smoke-tested under QEMU).
• 2026-10-10 · Readiness per audience: full ~47% (method aligned with the standard, was 42%), mainstream practitioner ~42%, essentials user ~54%, each with hours to ~95%.
• 2026-10-10 · Stage re-normalized to pre-alpha under craftrules' core-workflow gate: text can't be threaded by hand (no out-port click, no thread command).
• 2026-10-10 · Full re-measure against InDesign 2026 21.6 (menu dump, bundle formats and localizations, 124 issues): breadth ~80%, ready ~42% (down from the ~83% "including depth" of 2026-10-04, on user evidence and the INDD gap); progress docs restructured to the craftrules standard (docs/parity.md → docs/parity-checklist.md; new target-app-parity, gaps, roadmap, architecture, typography, file-format, UI, hardware and localization docs). Landed today: split columns (#295), PDF export options dialog (#196), column rules (#274), Paragraph Rules dialog (#263), Character Style Options (#144), PDF/X-4 RGB handling (#223), Spanish hyphenation (#222), Japanese (#272), Italian (#218) and Ukrainian (#236) interfaces, relocated packages relink (#244), graphics backend chosen before the window (#297), graphics adapter chosen by the display it drives with a restart on the next adapter or backend when one fails at start-up and the reason logged (#273, #334), IDML table styles (#288), warichu (#280), list numbering from IDML (#298), security hardening (#153, #155), many text-composition fixes (#282–#293).
• 2026-10-09 · Version 0.5.0; many user reports triaged into issues (#160–#265).
• 2026-10-08 · Version 0.4.0.
• 2026-10-07 · Community PRs: data merge, Brazilian Portuguese, PDF/X-4 flags, Office fonts on macOS; CJK 1.x (Korean line breaking, fallback fonts in Package); PrintCraft renamed PdfCraft.
• 2026-10-06 · Snapping to parent items, Windows packaging, ARM64 workflow, control-channel hardening.
• 2026-10-05 · FreeBSD build; caret-boundary fixes.
• 2026-10-04 · Never-crash pass across importers and the engine; rotate spread view; kashida in styles; previous estimate: breadth 99%, "~83% including depth", ~170 h remaining.
• 2026-10-03 · Release 0.1.1; separations, XML tagging, track changes, PDF/X-4 output intent, split window, buttons, menu customization.
• 2026-10-02 · Hyperlinks/Bookmarks panels, conditional text, tagged PDF, lists across stories, style groups, Glyphs panel, High Contrast theme.
• 2026-10-01 · First commit; skeleton, IDML, PDF, tables, footnotes, cross-references, index, spelling and parallel composition on the first day.

Revision history

Date	Change	Summary
2026-10-12	minor	Manual text threading landed; alpha distance 15–25 h → 5–7 h (Primary Text Frame page fixes, #165)
2026-10-11	minor	Localized Japanese print, import and table controls; readiness estimates unchanged
2026-10-10	minor	Full number 42% → 47% (method aligned with the standard: plain weighted sum, no new evidence); readiness table with hours per audience
2026-10-10	minor	Headline adds mainstream practitioner (~42%) and essentials user (~54%); method in docs/target-app-parity.md
2026-10-10	minor	Stage alpha → pre-alpha under the new core-workflow gate: manual text threading is missing; alpha gate table added to docs/roadmap.md
2026-10-10	major	Restructured to the progress-docs standard; full re-measure; the "Working today" inventory moved to docs/target-app-parity.md, milestones to docs/roadmap.md, the CLI/MCP section left to docs/agents.md (which already covered it)
2026-10-04	major	Parity estimate: breadth 99%, depth ~83%, ~170 h
2026-10-01	major	First roadmap: status, milestones