DesignCraft
Page layout and publishing, rebuilt in pure Rust.
A fast, open-source, clean-room take on the Adobe InDesign workflow — native on macOS, Windows and Linux, and in the browser via WebAssembly.
By the ArtCraft team.
Quarterly — Spring Issue: threaded three-column body text, a wrapped pull quote, parent-page folios, all set by DesignCraft's own paragraph composer.
 Cover: full-bleed graphic frame, display type |
 Styles: kicker rule, headline, deck, justified body |
 Threading, columns and text wrap |
Every page above was laid out by DesignCraft from code (crates/engine/src/sample.rs) and exported by its own renderer — try it with File → New → Sample Document or --sample.
Why DesignCraft
- Familiar. InDesign's layout, tools, menus, panels and shortcuts: spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, the Control panel, paragraph and character styles, swatches, text wrap… you already know how to use it.
- Beautiful type. A Knuth–Plass paragraph composer (plus single-line), hyphenation, justification, columns, baseline grid, keeps, tabs, rules and shading — and identical line breaks on screen and in export.
- Fast. Multithreaded SIMD rendering (vello_cpu), copy-on-write documents with O(1) undo snapshots, cached composition.
- Open. A documented native format, and IDML / PDF / PNG interchange on the roadmap — no subscription, no licence server, no telemetry.
- Agent-native. Every menu item, tool gesture, panel control and dialog is drivable over a JSON control channel and an MCP server, so Claude and other agents can lay out and edit documents like a designer.
- Everywhere. One Rust codebase for desktop and the web.
Quick start
cargo run --release -p designcraft # desktop app (start screen)
cargo run --release -p designcraft -- --sample # open the sample magazine
cargo run --release -p designcraft -- --sample --control 7979 # + JSON control channel
cargo run --release -p designcraft-cli -- run --sample --all-pages out/ # headless: render every page to PNG
cargo run --release -p designcraft-cli -- commands # list every command
cargo xtask ci # fmt, clippy, tests, assets, layering, wasm
Drive a running app: send JSON lines to 127.0.0.1:7979 — see docs/control-protocol.md.
Architecture
An engine-first Cargo workspace with enforced layering (cargo xtask layers); the egui frontend is a separate crate, so the UI can be swapped without touching the engine.
| Layer | Crates |
|---|---|
| L0 | geom (paths, units & measurement parsing, corner options) · color (CMYK/RGB/Lab, swatches, tints, gradients) |
| L1 | doc (spreads, pages, parents, layers, frames, stories, styles) · fonts (font DB, shaping, outlines) |
| L2 | compose (the text engine) |
| L3 | render (vello_cpu) |
| L4 | tools (pointer events → commands + overlays) |
| L5 | engine (session, history, command registry) |
| L6 | ui-egui (InDesign-style UI, control channel) |
| L7 | apps/designcraft, apps/designcraft-cli |
Status and milestones: ROADMAP.md. Contributor and agent rules (clean-room, asset policy, quality gates): AGENTS.md. Every bundled asset is listed with its licence in ASSETS.md.
Crafting Apps
Open-source, pure-Rust, clean-room creative tools — each engine-first, cross-platform, WASM-ready and fully agent-drivable.
| PhotoCraft | Layered raster image editor in the spirit of Photoshop — high-bit-depth pipeline, adjustment layers, brushes, PSD round-trip. |
| DrawCraft | Vector illustration in the spirit of Illustrator — Pen, Pathfinder, live effects, type, SVG/PDF. |
| DesignCraft | Page layout in the spirit of InDesign — spreads, threaded stories, styles, a Knuth–Plass composer. (you are here) |
| FilmCraft | Non-linear video editor in the spirit of Premiere Pro — timeline editing, effects, and export. |
| LightCraft | Photo library and non-destructive raw developer in the spirit of Lightroom — local-first catalog, wide-gamut float pipeline. |
| PrintCraft | PDF viewer and editor in the spirit of Acrobat — rendering, forms, annotations, and document tools. |
License
MIT OR Apache-2.0. Bundled fonts are OFL; all icons are drawn in code and are original. Per-asset attribution: ASSETS.md (see also NOTICE).
DesignCraft is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe. "Adobe", "InDesign", "Illustrator", "Photoshop", "Premiere Pro", "Lightroom" and "Acrobat" are trademarks of Adobe Inc., used here only to describe compatibility and workflow familiarity.