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designcraft/docs/hardware-parity.md
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Brandon ThomasandClaude Opus 5.5 a127c6d5c3 Progress docs: target-app parity, gaps, alpha gate, readiness by audience (#355)
Progress docs per craftrules standards/progress-docs.md: target-app parity, gaps, roadmap with alpha gate, readiness by audience (full / mainstream / essentials) with Opus 5.5 hours, and feature, format, hardware, UI and localization parity docs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
2026-10-10 14:09:17 -04:00

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Hardware and platform parity

Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-10 · Change: major (first version) · Target: Adobe InDesign 2026 (21.6)

What InDesign does with hardware, per platform, against DesignCraft. Layout is not a GPU-hungry workload, so this dimension carries little weight, but a start that fails on a graphics driver loses the user entirely. Overall numbers: target-app-parity.md.

Hardware: ~45% ready, 20–40 h. Platforms: ~55% ready, 40–80 h. (estimated)

Hardware features

Feature InDesign 2026 DesignCraft macOS Windows Linux Web
GPU display (canvas) GPU Performance: GPU preview, animated zoom (Metal on macOS; Windows with supported GPUs) canvas rasterized on the CPU (vello_cpu, SIMD, multithreaded), presented by wgpu (Metal) wgpu DirectX 12 (since #297), Vulkan/OpenGL fallback Vulkan, OpenGL fallback WebGPU, WebGL2 fallback
Start-up on any GPU robust Metal device lost on Intel Macs (#334) AMD OpenGL crash (#167), launch failures (#273) some reports (#192, #220)
Backend fallback n/a gpu.json skips a backend whose start never showed a frame (#297) same same
Animated / scrubby zoom ✓ (GPU) ✓ (CPU tiles, damage regions) ✓ ✓ ✓
HiDPI / Retina ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
UI scaling ✓ ✓ (menus and dialogs usable at larger scales, #281) ✓ ✓ ✓
Multi-monitor, floating document windows ✓ ~ one window; New Window for the same document ~ ~ ✗
Printing system print with PPDs, PostScript, separations PDF to lpr ✗ (no lpr) PDF to lpr (CUPS) browser download
Colour-managed display (monitor profile) ✓ ✗ (working CMYK profile simulated; monitor profile not applied) ✗ ✗ ✗
Touch / pen Touch workspace (Windows), gestures trackpad pinch/scroll ~ ~ ~
Multi-core composition single-threaded composer per story (documented by Adobe as mostly single-threaded) parallel story composition (rayon), 6.7× on the sample ✓ ✓ single-threaded

Platforms

Platform InDesign 2026 DesignCraft Evidence
macOS (Apple silicon, Intel) ✓ ✓ primary development platform Intel GPU start failure (#334); window controls misaligned (#333); font managers (#327)
Windows x64 ✓ ~ builds and installers ship copy/paste and context menus (#351, #312), installer confusion (#64), launch failures (#273, #167)
Windows ARM64 ✓ ~ build (CI workflow) not exercised at runtime
Linux (x86_64, aarch64) ✗ ~ deb, AppImage, Flatpak clipboard (#164), panels don't scroll (#267), CJK UI font (#332)
FreeBSD ✗ ~ build
Web (WASM) ✗ (InDesign on the web is not shipped) ~ same UI, file picker, downloads; no control channel

DesignCraft runs on more platforms than InDesign; what's missing is runtime testing on the ones the developers don't use daily.

Remaining effort

Work Opus 5.5 h
Start-up robustness on every GPU: confirm #297 with reporters, Intel Metal fix, CPU-only present fallback 15–30
Printing on Windows (system print API) and print presets 15–30 (counted in file-format-parity.md)
Monitor profile in display colour management 5–10
Windows and Linux runtime smoke tests in CI 20–40
Multi-window document views 15–30
Hardware + platforms 60–120

Revision history

Date Change Summary
2026-10-10 major Created from the code, InDesign 2026's GPU Performance features and the issue tracker