pdfcraft/ROADMAP.md

PrintCraft roadmap

The milestones, current progress and time estimates to Acrobat Pro feature parity. Keep this up to date:

• Every session: update the progress column and add a line to the log.
• Every milestone: re-estimate.

Detailed task lists and acceptance tests are in plan/execution-plan.md (local-only). This file is the public summary.

What "parity" means here: the offline feature set of Acrobat Pro, milestones M0–M14. It excludes Adobe's cloud services (Document Cloud storage, Adobe Sign, the Adobe AI Assistant). Those have no clean-room equivalent; PrintCraft's alternatives are local-first, plus opt-in providers (M13).

Estimate summary

The unit is wall-clock hours of agent work: Claude Opus-class models coding continuously, with a person reviewing at milestone boundaries. Time spent waiting for that review is not included.

Scenario	Hours to parity (M0–M14)	Continuous calendar time
One agent, 24/7	2,000–4,000 h	≈ 3–6 months
3–5 agents in parallel on separate crates after M4	800–1,500 h	≈ 5–9 weeks
Realistic, with human review, integration and pauses	—	≈ 4–9 months (see plan/execution-plan.md §9)

How these numbers are built:

• Size: about 450–700k lines of Rust at parity, including tests. The repo has about 15k today.
• Rate: so far, about 1.0–1.5k lines of kept, tested code per agent-hour. That includes debugging against the oracles (qpdf, poppler, pdf.js corpus).
• Why the total is 3–6× the raw typing time: the hard work is not the line count. Most of the time goes into fidelity work: text editing and reflow, font embedding, redaction that really removes content, signature validation, PDF/A and PDF/UA, XFA, OCR and web performance. Each of these needs repeated oracle checks and visual comparison.
• Parallelism is limited early: M0–M4 are mostly sequential, because the core crates must settle first. Extra agents pay off from M5 onwards.
• The long tail: the last 5–10% (odd real-world files, pixel-level polish) costs about as much as the first 50%.

Milestones

Hours are for a single agent (low–high). "Done" is the estimated fraction of that milestone's acceptance criteria that are met. It is not a count of lines of code.

M	Milestone	Est. hours	Done	Remaining (h)	Notes
M0	Skeleton: workspace, xtask gates, CI	15–30	70%	5–10	Missing: GitHub workflow, deny.toml, remaining crate stubs, parity TOML
M1	COS: filters, crypt, parser, xref, writer	120–200	55%	55–90	Done: - filters and crypt: every standard-security revision R2–R6 (RC4, AES-128/256), SASLprep, permissions, creating encryption; - cos: parse and repair, decrypt on load, re-encrypt on save, incremental and full writing. Corpus: open/edit/save passes on 958 files, and all 7 password-protected files open. Missing: object-stream and xref-stream output, fuzzing, ≥ 250 tests
M2	Model, render, text	200–350	15%	170–300	hayro bootstrap renderer (vendored patches). Text extraction reaches word-F1 0.98 against pdftotext. Missing: model crate, fonts, DisplayList, renderer independent of hayro
M3	Viewer app (native + web)	80–150	65%	30–55	Acrobat-style shell, find, select, panels, tiles, web build. Missing: UI control channel, 60 fps test on a 500-page document, snapshot tests of every panel
M4	Engine, history, save, organize	100–180	60%	40–70	Done: - command registry (menus, shortcuts and palette all use it); - undo/redo; incremental, atomic and encrypted saves; - autosave and crash recovery; - organize, combine, extract, split and insert-from-file; - CLI edit/combine/extract/split. Missing: bookmark and page-label editing, page boxes, CLI run, recovery on the web
M5	Comments (all annotation types, XFDF)	120–200	0%	120–200	Read-only comments panel exists
M6	Forms + JavaScript	160–320	0%	160–320	Fields are displayed, not filled
M7	Content editing (text, images, header/footer, watermark)	250–500	0%	250–500	Longest pole
M8	Security + redaction	100–180	10%	90–160	Done: opening protected documents, honouring permissions, and the engine side of setting and removing passwords. Missing: Protect UI, certificate security, sanitize, redaction
M9	Signatures (PAdES, validation)	160–280	0%	160–280
M10	OCR, create, export, print	200–350	0%	200–350
M11	Optimize, preflight, PDF/A/X/UA, print production	200–350	0%	200–350
M12	Accessibility, compare, measure, search, XFA	200–380	0%	200–380
M13	Automation (MCP, Action Wizard, CLI) + AI providers	60–120	0%	60–120
M14	1.0 polish: performance, localization, installers	120–250	0%	120–250
	Total	2,085–3,840	≈ 7%	≈ 1,870–3,465

Overall progress: about 7% of the effort. The viewer and the core are far ahead of the editing features, because the viewer was built first so progress could be seen.

Critical path

M0 → M1 → M2 → M3 → M4 must happen in order. After M4, M5–M12 can run in parallel across crates. The long poles are M7 (content editing), M9 (signatures) and M12 (XFA).

Risks most likely to push estimates up

• Fidelity of text editing: fonts, subsets, reflow.
• XFA dynamic layout.
• Real-world signature chains and revocation checks.
• The rendering long tail: Type3 fonts, broken fonts, shadings.
• Correctness of PDF/A and PDF/UA conversion.
• CPU rendering performance on the web.

Log

Newest first. One line per session: the date, what moved, and the new overall percentage.

• 2026-09-30 (session 4):
  • Combine, extract and split, with links, named destinations, fields, layers, attachments and nested bookmarks all carried over. Combined pages render pixel-identical to their sources.
  • Fixed a precision bug in how reals were written.
  • Encryption: a new crypt crate covering R2–R6. Encrypted documents can be opened, edited and saved; permissions are honoured; the Security tab is real. Checked against hayro and qpdf.
  • Autosave and crash recovery.
  • Command registry.
  • Asset policy (AGENTS.md, ATTRIBUTION.toml, xtask assets) and a README with 13 reproducible screenshots (xtask screenshots).
  • Overall ≈ 7%.
• 2026-09-30 (session 3):
  • New crates: filters (every non-image filter, 57 tests) and cos (object parser, xref reader, repair, incremental and full writer).
  • New organize crate: page operations and info edits.
  • Engine: editing with undo/redo and save. CLI: edit.
  • UI: organize toolbar with multi-select, ⌘Z/⇧⌘Z/⌘S/⇧⌘S, Edit menu, editable Description properties, a dot on tabs with unsaved changes, and a save prompt on close and quit. 13 new kittest tests.
  • Corpus: open, edit and save round-trip on 946 of 951 files. 182 of 182 sampled saved outputs pass qpdf --check.
  • Overall ≈ 5%.
• 2026-09-30 (session 2):
  • Robustness sweep (963 of 983 files open, 0 crashes), text layer, find and select, tiles, web build, polish.
  • Overall ≈ 3–4%.
• 2026-09-30 (session 1): planning complete; viewer vertical slice.