A fourth Image Trace mode for flat-colour logos. The existing tracer follows hard pixel
edges, so an outline can only be as good as the pixel grid; here each pixel is read as a
blend of the logo's flat colours, the blend is interpolated smoothly (cubic B-spline), and
every outline is placed where two colours are equally present, to a fraction of a pixel.
Outlines are then cleaned the way a person would:
- corners the blur rounded are put back (line fits either side of a bend, intersected);
- near-straight runs and near-circular arcs become exact lines and arcs (Snap Curves To Lines);
- the rest is fitted with as few cubic Beziers as the tolerance allows (Schneider);
- touching colours overlap by 0.06 px so no hairline gap opens between independent fits;
- shapes are painted biggest first; transparent areas fully enclosed by artwork (letters
knocked out of a badge, the counters of an "o") are painted white so the logo reads the
same on any background, or become real holes with Ignore White (each hole belongs to the
smallest outline containing it);
- an outline whose fit strays more than 1.4 px from the raw contour is fitted plainly.
Colours are found automatically (and completed from pixels no blend of the known colours
explains, so a small accent is not lost) or named with `logoColors: ["#rrggbb", ...]` (white is
always its own class; colours closer than 12 count as one; at most ten). Gradients and photos
are refused with advice to use Color (a flat-colour score of the solid areas, 0.93). A
hard-edged source with no anti-aliasing is softened by under a pixel and fitted with looser
snap tolerances. Images over 1024 px on the long side are averaged down first (further, if
they are busy enough to make the unmixing expensive) and the result is mapped back exactly.
More real outlines than we will fit are refused, not silently truncated.
Also: a "Flat Logo" preset, the mode in the Image Trace panel (Method hidden: it always
stacks), the command docs and MCP prompt, es/fr/it/ru translations for the two new messages
and the mode name, and the ROADMAP.
Never-crash: no unwrap/expect/panic, every size and float is bounded and checked, with
tests for degenerate and extreme input (NaN/infinite parameters, 0x0 and 1x1 images, sparse
outlines, an anchor budget, a 200,000-entry palette) and a 250-run randomised no-panic
property test. The B-spline interpolation follows Unser et al. and Thevenaz et al., and the
curve fitter follows Schneider (Graphics Gems); both are written from the papers.
Measured (local experiment, not in CI): a flat-colour logo's vector original rendered down
to a soft 199x100 px PNG and traced. Mean edge error vs the original at 1600 px wide:
built-in colour presets 2.5 to 3.4 px, Flat Logo 0.78 px (0.48 px from a crisp source);
region overlap 0.88-0.91 vs 0.966. About 0.1 s for a 200 px logo.
Tests: 60 new in the trace crate (unmix, field, contours, geometry, Beziers, corners,
outline fitting, palette, end-to-end on synthetic shapes made in code) and 3 in the engine.
cargo xtask ci passes (fmt, clippy, test, assets, brands, layers, wasm): 4,290 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Advanced › Create: Fills and/or Strokes, with Stroke (the widest line, px).
With Strokes, each colour's 8-connected parts no wider than the stroke width
(chamfer distance transform) trace as open centre lines instead of filled
outlines: the line is thinned to one pixel (Zhang-Suen with each removal
re-checked, so two-pixel lines survive; staircase corners dropped), its
skeleton becomes runs between ends and junctions (junction pixels merged,
spurs pruned, runs through two-way junctions joined, rings closed), and each
run is simplified and fitted with curves. The stroke width is the line's mean
width (pixels over length). Traced lines get round caps and joins in the
document. Without Fills, wider areas become 1 px stroked outlines.
`imageTrace.make` takes fills, strokes and strokeWidth, and refuses neither
fills nor strokes and a non-positive width.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Color mode's colours now come from a Palette (`palette` in imageTrace.make's
params), shown in the Image Trace panel under Mode:
- Limited: the `colors` best colours (what Color did before; the default).
- Full Tone: median cut until no colour box spans more than 96 (Less) … 8
(More) levels per channel, up to 256 colours, set by `colorDetail` 0-100
(the panel's Colors slider for this palette).
- Automatic: flat art (90% of the pixels in a few tight colours) traces with
exactly its colours, anything else as Full Tone.
- Document Library: the most used (at most `colors`) colours of the
document's swatches or of a swatch library (`library`: "document" or a
library id or name, chosen in the panel's Library list), used as they are;
traced shapes fill with the swatch's own colour, its colour model kept.
The library's colours are looked up at every trace, not saved.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- The Image Trace panel's Advanced options sit under a full-width collapsible
header (widgets::section_toggle, also used by New Document's Advanced
Options); whether it is open is kept with the UI preferences.
- View: Tracing Result, Tracing Result with Outlines, Outlines, Outlines with
Source Image and Source Image, in the panel, the Control bar and the
Properties panel. The view is saved in the Image Trace object's settings
(`trace.view`), kept when it is traced again, set with the new
`imageTrace.setView` command (or `view` on imageTrace.make) and drawn by the
canvas only (RenderOptions::trace_views): exports, printing and Expand keep
the tracing result.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Merging regions united the faces' outlines with a boolean union. Each
face had been refit on its own, so two faces' shared edge could come out
a hair apart: the union then kept the edge between them, or a spur of
it, and a stroked merged shape (unfilled art) showed a stray line inside.
Subtracting the merged shape from the others left slivers along it too.
pathops::FaceMerger merges faces from the planar arrangement itself,
made once per merge: their contours share their edges exactly, so the
edges between merged faces vanish. The Shape Builder builds the merged
shape that way, and what is left of each shape from its faces not merged
(rather than subtracting the merged shape from it). Selections with open
paths keep the old union.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Alt already deleted regions and pieces of open lines, but erase mode had
no edges of closed shapes, no distinct pointer, highlighted regions in the
merge-mode grey, only noticed Alt on a mouse move, and an erase drag could
flip mode at release. Like the reference app's erase mode:
- pathops::shape_builder(shapes, edges) returns a BuilderArrangement; with
`edges` it also cuts the outlines of closed (and filled open) paths
wherever other paths meet them. pathops::cut_out removes such a piece
from a path: a closed subpath opens there, an open one splits or
shortens, a piece all the way round takes its subpath, and a filled open
path's invisible closing edge never comes back as a visible segment.
Specks where paths only touch cut nothing; a zero-length input is no
longer the source of edges running through it. encloses_area is shared
with the tool's closing of filled open paths.
- BuilderMap (with_edges) hit-tests edges like line pieces (nearest wins);
an erase gesture that crosses an edge into a region deletes the region,
not the edge (erased_edges).
- shapeBuilder.merge {erase}: deletes the edges touched within tolerance
(from every shape along them), after the regions; returns `edges`.
shapeBuilder.regions lists `edges` (bounds, source). One undo step.
- Shape Builder tool: Alt held switches to erase mode and back on release:
red mesh/edge highlights of what will be deleted, a minus pointer
(Cursor::ShapeBuilder / ShapeBuilderErase, a plus in merge mode); a drag
keeps the mode it started in. The canvas re-hovers the tool when a
modifier changes, so the highlight follows Alt without a mouse move.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Shape Builder only used the filled areas of the selected paths, so a
stroke-only line or open path across a shape did nothing. Like the
reference app's Shape Builder, open paths now act as cutting edges:
- pathops::shape_builder: with an open path in the selection, the
regions are the Live Paint planar map's faces (every path an edge), so a
line across a shape splits it and lines can enclose a region of their
own; it also returns each open path cut where other paths meet it. Closed
shapes alone, more than SHAPE_BUILDER_MAX_SEGMENTS segments, or a map
that can't be built fall back to the filled-area arrangement.
- Filled open paths count as closed (an invisible closing edge) where that
encloses an area; unfilled open paths and straight lines stay edges.
- shapeBuilder.merge: merging or deleting regions on both sides of a line
piece removes that piece (the line is split, its other pieces kept); an
area only lines enclose takes the current fill and the front-most
object's look. Alt (erase) within `tolerance` of a line piece deletes it.
Returns `lines` (pieces deleted).
- shapeBuilder.regions also lists the line pieces.
- The tool shares BuilderMap/Touched with the command, highlights the line
piece under the pointer while Alt is held and passes its tolerance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Live Paint Bucket now fills areas enclosed by any paths. Crossing
lines enclose faces it can fill, a line across a shape splits that shape's
face in two, and an area enclosed by paths becomes a face even when nothing
fills it (it starts unfilled). Edges are the paths cut wherever another path
meets them, keeping their stroke, so Shift-click paints each piece. Closed
shapes give the same faces as before.
Root cause: Live Paint built its faces from the Pathfinder regions, which
divide the filled areas of closed shapes. An open path counted only as the
area it would fill if closed, which for a straight line is nothing, so lines
divided nothing and the bucket found no face to fill. A new planar map in
vectorcraft-pathops (live_paint) sweeps every path as an edge: an open path
goes in traced there and back, with crossing counts that never cancel; faces
are walked on the resulting graph (holes included), and their fills and the
edges' sources are found geometrically. The sweep runs in an exactly sheared
frame, because it mishandles a horizontal line traced there and back.
Make, Merge, the bucket and Live Paint Selection all use it;
interior_point moves to vectorcraft-pathops with it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Links panel lists every image (thumbnail, name, page, missing/modified/embedded
badge) with Show filters, sorting and thumbnail sizes; its buttons and flyout relink
(to a file or a folder), go to, update, edit the original, embed and unembed, show in
folder and open Placement Options. Link Info shows format, colour space, location, ppi
and effective ppi, dimensions, scale, rotation, size and dates. Edit > Edit Original
and the Properties panel's image section reach the same commands.
Engine: links.list, links.goTo, links.embed, links.unembed, links.info and
links.placementOptions; links.relink and links.update now place the new file as the
image's Placement Options say (transforms, bounds, file dimensions, fit, fill, the
alignment point, clip to the old bounds). Model: ImageObject.placement.
UI: links.editOriginal, links.reveal, ui.placementOptionsDialog; Services.open_file
and pick_folder on the desktop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A linked image (`ImageObject.link`, now a LinkInfo: absolute path, path relative to the document,
size, modification time, hash, page; old path strings still load) keeps a low-resolution preview
(`ImageBlob.proxy`, at most 256 px a side) that a native save writes in place of the pixels of
images only linked images show. Opening a native document reads the linked files again, looking
for each at its path, then relative to the document and by name in its folder: missing files
show their preview, modified ones are read again only with Update Links: Automatically.
`document.open` reports `missingLinks`, `modifiedLinks` and `updatedLinks`.
links.check reports each link's status, links.update reads modified files again and
links.relink points images at another file or at same-named files in a folder (each keeps its
bounds; one undo step). In the app, a document opened without its linked files asks about each
(Replace…, Ignore, Apply to All), then offers to update modified links when the preference asks.
The renderer caches previews apart from the file's pixels; the Eyedropper samples previews in
the object's pixel space.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
