photocraft/docs/shape-strokes.md

Shape stroke options

Updated 2026-10-11: direct editing, compact layout, and clickable colour/style controls.

PhotoCraft's Shape tool options bar has a Stroke Options button beside the existing width and colour controls. It sets defaults for new Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle, Polygon, Line and Custom Shape layers. Pen in Shape mode uses the same style defaults; open Pen shapes retain their existing foreground colour and minimum 1 px width. To edit an existing shape, use Properties → Appearance → Stroke Options.

Fill and Stroke swatches are clickable and open the existing compact colour picker. Choosing a colour preserves its alpha; No Color removes the corresponding paint. Tool-bar fill uses the foreground colour and stroke uses the background colour, as before. Choosing a stroke colour or style deliberately enables a 3 px stroke when no stroke is present. The style button remains available with no stroke, but opening or dismissing it alone does not enable one. Properties edits the selected shape; the options bar continues to set defaults for new shapes.

The editor offers Solid, Dashed (4 widths on, 2 off), Dotted (zero-length dashes with round caps, spaced every 2 widths), and custom repeating dash/gap sequences. Dash lengths and offsets are multiples of the stroke width; width itself is in document pixels. Odd-length imported sequences repeat twice, following the existing renderer convention. Up to 16 dash/gap pairs can be edited, with Add pair / Remove pair. Zero-length dashes draw dots with Round caps and squares with Square caps; Butt caps draw nothing at a zero-length dash. Each preset's full row, including its line sample, is one clickable target with a visible selected state and an accessible label.

Caps are Butt / Flat, Round, and Square. They affect open endpoints and individual dashed segments. Closed solid shapes have no endpoints, so their cap control is disabled. Corners are Miter, Round, or Bevel; Miter limit is a ratio, 1–500 (the existing default remains 100). Sharp miters exceeding the limit become bevels. Ellipse has no sharp corners, so its corner controls are disabled. The Line tool retains its existing filled-bar geometry: strokes follow the bar's closed outline. Use an open Pen shape for a centerline with endpoint caps.

Inside / Center / Outside alignment applies to paths whose subpaths are all closed. Inside and Outside clip a double-width stroke against the shape's fill area and respect the existing fill rule and component operations. Open and mixed open/closed paths use Center; their alignment control is disabled. Dash lengths continue to use the specified width, including for Inside and Outside. Opacity is independent of width and paint.

Stroke Options applies valid changes immediately and has no Apply or Cancel buttons. Properties sends changes through shape.edit; one continuous numeric drag is one undo step. Escape or a click outside closes the popup and retains already applied changes. Opening or closing it without changing a value creates no history entry. Invalid pending numeric values do not replace the last valid style. Child dropdowns can open and select an option without dismissing Stroke Options; Escape closes the child before the parent. The popup fits its content and scrolls only when the available height requires it.

The compact line and rectangle previews use the real vector renderer. Tool-default changes do not edit the document. Shape drag previews use the vector renderer, with a cached screen proxy capped at 2048 pixels on the longest axis; like the prior drag overlay, their colours bypass monitor-profile conversion. Committed shapes, including live Properties edits, use the normal colour-managed compositor.

Finite values are required: width 0–1,000,000 px, opacity 0–100%, dash/gap lengths 0–10,000 widths, offset ±1,000,000 widths, at most 32 lengths, and a nonempty pattern total of at least 0.01 widths. Interactive commands reject geometry beyond ±1,000,000 px, over 4096 knots/subpaths, more than 100,000 tessellation points, or a dash workload over 100,000 steps. File-supplied invalid/dense patterns are bounded during rendering. There are no custom saved preset libraries in this change. Style defaults use existing serde UI state, but the app does not save and restore these defaults across restarts.

All fields already exist in ShapeStroke and the native manifest/conversion. Old .pcraft files retain their serde defaults; saves preserve all style fields. PSD import/export maps the same fields through vstk (line width, dash set/offset, cap, join, alignment, miter limit, opacity, and paint); existing unknown layer blocks and original compatible vector records remain handled by the existing I/O path. Stroke overprint, non-Normal PSD vector-stroke blend modes, corner-fitting dash optimization, and Photoshop's saved stroke preset libraries are not implemented. No Photoshop-authored oracle establishes exact stroke UI parity here.

Automation: shape.create, shape.edit, and shape.info expose document strokes. The control channel also supports ui.set {shapeStroke: {width, align, cap, join, miterLimit, dashes, dashOffset, opacity}} for tool defaults, merging partial fields; null sets width to zero. Set tool colours with tools.setColors. ui.inspect reports toolOptions.shape_stroke, toolOptions.stroke_width, and the transient strokeEditor. Keyboard focus, standard number fields, colour pickers, and ComboBoxes remain native egui controls.

Upstream and public references

• PR #2218 introduced these controls with staged previews. The direct-edit interaction above replaces that Apply/Cancel workflow.
• Issue #2496 tracks broader Shape tool parity, including selected-shape editing from the options bar and additional fill types; those remain separate work.
• Issue #1053 documents the missing stroke controls and existing engine/model support. Gradient fill UI remains separate work.
• Issue #1931 requests sharp stroke options.
• PR #233, #397, and #1495 already address stroke compositing, hairlines, and depth preservation; their implementations are reused.
• PR #2031 supplies the click-to-create dialogs. Both dialogs and drag creation use its shared create_shape helper, which receives the complete stroke defaults. A gesture regression checks both paths and their undo steps.
• Adobe's Photoshop shape fill/stroke guide describes the tool options and Properties entry points, and its cap/join reference defines endpoint and corner behavior and the 1–500 miter range. Dash units reuse PhotoCraft's existing documented ShapeStroke/vstk convention.