Files
vectorcraft/ROADMAP.md
T
bflatastic 0497c9e46d #1007: Reverse Gradient mirrors off-centre midpoints
Reversal read the midpoints after Gradient::reverse had reordered the stops, so each stop
took the wrong segment's midpoint: red-to-blue with its midpoint at 20% reversed to a 50%
midpoint instead of 80%, moving the transition.

Gradient::reverse now mirrors each segment's midpoint with it, so a reversed gradient is the
same ramp the other way round; paint.editGradient's own (wrong) pass is gone, and the SVG
importer's reflect spread, which had a correct copy of the same mirroring, uses it too.

Tests: two- and three-stop gradients with off-centre midpoints sample the same reversed (t vs
1 - t) and come back after two reversals; paint.editGradient reverse turns a 0.2 midpoint into
0.8.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>

# Conflicts:
#	ROADMAP.md
2026-10-11 03:51:31 +07:00

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VectorCraft Roadmap

Stage: alpha · next: beta, ~13 points (ready for real work ~62% → ~75%, and reliable .ai exchange) and ~170–270 h away

Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-11 · Change: minor (Effect › Brush Strokes landed: Photoshop-style filters 28 of 57, raster effects 40% → 48%) · Target: Adobe Illustrator 2026 (30.x)

VectorCraft is a clean-room, open-source, pure-Rust reimplementation of the Adobe Illustrator workflow. It runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the web (WASM), and agents can drive all of it over MCP, the CLI and a JSON control channel. This page is the summary; the evidence is in docs/target-app-parity.md and the work list in docs/gaps.md.

Why alpha: the core workflows exist end to end (drawing and path editing, Pathfinder, paint and appearance, type, SVG/PDF/EPS, print, export) and feature depth is ~75%, but a professional can't yet switch: Illustrator's own .ai files open with a wrong layer structure in real cases and can't be saved back with Illustrator's editing data, the interaction details have never been checked side by side, and some machines fail to start the app. Beta needs those closed (the beta list in gaps.md). It passes the core-workflow gate: all six core workflows (path drawing and editing, paint and style, type, layers/artboards/export, print production, file exchange) work end to end on macOS with save and reopen, and only the last is partial, without blocking it (Alpha gate).

Headline numbers

Value Kind
Feature breadth (Illustrator's menu items, tools, effects, formats exist) ~88% measured in part: menu items 348/375 wired (92.8%), tools 89/92, Illustrator effects 44/50, Photoshop effects 28/57, 3D 1/4 (initial Revolve)
Feature depth (weighted by use, scored by behaviour) ~75% estimated
To beta ~170–270 h one agent · ~50–80 h with 4–6 agents estimated
To full parity ~360–590 h one agent · ~95–165 h with 4–6 agents estimated

Readiness by audience (all estimated; method in target-app-parity.md):

Audience Ready % Opus 5.5 agent hours to ~95% (one agent) With 4–6 agents Work that dominates
Full Illustrator (ready for real work; decides the stage) ~62% (57–67%) ~340–560 h ~95–160 h the mainstream work below, plus 3D (50–85 h), raster effects (24–40 h), advanced type (20–28 h), generative AI (30–60 h), localization (70–110 h) and ecosystem
Mainstream illustrator ~65% (60–70%) ~230–380 h ~65–110 h the interaction-fidelity pass (60–90 h), hardening and QA (30–50 h), stability (20–35 h), performance budgets (15–25 h), .ai exchange (10–20 h), the remaining depth of the everyday areas
Essentials user ~75% (70–80%) ~60–105 h ~25–45 h launch and stability on Windows (20–35 h), in-app help and onboarding (8–15 h), basic QA (10–15 h), Shape Builder regions (4–8 h), UI polish

Hours are Opus 5.5 agent wall-clock hours, calibrated from this repo's merged-PR timestamps (e.g. 0.7–1.2 h per Photoshop-style filter, ~0.8 h per medium feature); see calibration. The installed Illustrator was not inspected: the clean-room rule in AGENTS.md forbids it, so everything is measured from our code against Illustrator's public documentation.

By dimension

Dimension % One agent (h) Doc
Features (depth) 75% 220–360 target-app-parity.md
UI/UX fidelity 55% 70–110 ui-parity.md
File formats 75% 15–30 file-format-parity.md
Hardware (GPU, pen, touch, displays) 35% 25–45 hardware-parity.md
Localization (12 key languages) 54% (measured) 70–110 localization-parity.md
Performance ~60% 15–25 gaps.md › G15
Stability ~60% 30–50 gaps.md › G10
Platforms 80% 15–25 gaps.md › G8
Ecosystem and plug-ins 15% 30–60 gaps.md › G17
AI features (generative) 0% 30–60 + owner decision gaps.md › G18
Agent automation beyond Illustrator — mcp.md

The dimension hours overlap (feature rows hold some UI, format and AI work), so they don't add up to the total.

Features

Area % One agent (h)
Selection, transform & align 85% 4–6
Drawing tools 85% 8–13
Path operations, Pathfinder, Shape Builder, Live Paint 80% 4–8
Colour, swatches, gradients, patterns, mesh, recolor 92% 4–7
Strokes, brushes, width profiles 88% 8–15
Appearance, transparency, graphic styles, masks 97% 1–2
Live vector effects 85% 6–10
Raster effects (Effect Gallery) — effects-parity.md 48% 24–40
3D and Materials ~8% 50–85
Type core — type-parity.md 80% 14–19
Type advanced (CJK, spelling, Touch Type) 50% 20–28
Symbols, blends, envelopes, Repeat, perspective 85% 6–10
Image Trace, graphs, image tools 75% 5–8
Layers, artboards, document setup 78% 5–8
View & navigation 70% 9–14
Guides, grids, smart guides, snapping 80% 4–7
File formats — file-format-parity.md 75% 10–20
Export for Screens, Asset Export, slices 85% 2–4
Print, colour management, separations 80% 2–4
Automation (Actions, Variables, scripting) 60% 8–14
UI chrome (panels, Properties, preferences) 80% 13–20
Libraries, Links, Package 82% 2–3
Generative AI 0% 30–60

Weights, evidence and the missing items per area: target-app-parity.md.

Languages

Language Code Status Translated
English en full 100%
Simplified Chinese zh-hans partial (messages in English) 85%
Spanish es full 100%
Hindi hi none 0%
Arabic ar none (no right-to-left interface) 0%
French fr full 100%
Portuguese (Brazil) pt-br partial 68%
Indonesian id none 0%
Japanese ja full 100%
German de full 98%
Korean ko none 0%
Vietnamese vi none 0%

Also shipped: Traditional Chinese (partial, 80%), Italian, Russian and Ukrainian (full), Czech (menus only). No catalog has had a native speaker's review. Details: localization-parity.md.

Upcoming

Ranked; detail in docs/roadmap.md and docs/gaps.md.

  1. Interaction-fidelity pass (G1), tool by tool from ui-parity.md: 60–90 h.
  2. .ai files from real users (G9): layer structure, guides, speed: 10–20 h.
  3. Launch and stability on real machines (G10): 20–35 h.
  4. Core-tool correctness (G11: Shape Builder regions, Asset Export borders): 8–15 h.
  5. Raster effects (G2) alongside: 29 filters and the Effect Gallery, 24–40 h.
  6. Then: type core and advanced type (G4), the Illustrator 2026 additions (G13), 3D (G3).

Progress log

Date What landed
2026-10-11 Effect › Brush Strokes: Accented Edges, Angled Strokes, Crosshatch, Dark Strokes, Ink Outlines, Spatter, Sprayed Strokes, Sumi-e (G2). Command parameters from agents and files checked before anything changes (paint, place, cuts, dashes, crop, asset ids, anchors, paths, distort; #984–#999); command dialogs keep whole numbers whole, so Create Object Mosaic takes the tiles typed (#1000); stepper arrows take Shift (×10) and Ctrl/Cmd (÷10) like the arrow keys (#991). Exports and Rasterize supersample Art Optimized edges, so shapes meeting edge to edge leave no seam (#983). Character and paragraph styles take leading, kerning, mojikumi and the other attributes left out at their defaults (#1001). Drawing, typing and pasting with no layer shown and unlocked is refused instead of adding art to a hidden or locked layer (#1002). MCP add_text gives type on or in a path the colour asked for (#1003). MCP screenshot of a connected app renders the artboard asked for (#1004). vectorcraft-cli run ends quietly when its reader closes early (#1005). Select › All on Active Artboard selects on the artboard made active, not always the first (#1006). Reverse Gradient keeps off-centre midpoints, mirrored (#1007).
2026-10-10 Initial live Revolve (Effect › 3D and Materials, #846, #605), in its own three-d crate. Progress docs re-measured and restructured to the craftrules standard (this page, docs/target-app-parity.md, gaps.md, ui-parity.md, the format, hardware, localization, effects and type checklists). Same day: v0.8.0; Effect › Distort, Pixelate and Texture filters (13); German interface; Variables (data merge); Graph Type value axes and tick marks; restart when the first frame never reaches the screen (#964)
2026-10-09 Radial Blur, Smart Blur, Unsharp Mask (gap 2 begins); 340 commits, the busiest day
2026-10-08 v0.5.0–v0.7.0; community contributions: Pen and shape-tool modifiers, Layers, Artboards, Japanese composition, Hebrew/Arabic type, interface languages, saved selections
2026-10-07 v0.4.0; issue fixes; Layers panel rework
2026-10-06 M8 transform and distort fidelity pass (M8.1–M8.20)
2026-10-05 M4 files done (M4.14–M4.98); M3 paint and appearance done (92 tasks over two days)
2026-10-02 First weighted parity estimate (22 areas); look and feel measured against public screenshots
2026-10-01 Renamed from DrawCraft to VectorCraft
2026-09-30 Repository history begins

The full pre-standard record of what landed is kept in docs/roadmap.md.

Revision history

Date Change Summary
2026-10-10 minor Method aligned with the standard, no new evidence: full ready for real work is the additive weighted sum, ~62%; hours per audience; beta ~13 points away
2026-10-10 minor Added the essentials-user readiness score (~75%)
2026-10-10 minor Ready for real work re-examined against the issue tracker and user feedback: 50% → 55% (full), 65% mainstream added; see target-app-parity.md
2026-10-10 minor Applied the core-workflow gate (docs/roadmap.md › Alpha gate): passes, stage stays alpha
2026-10-10 major Re-measured against Illustrator 2026 (30.x) from code counts, 71 open issues and public docs; stage set to alpha; moved the parity estimate, honest assessment and "Shipped so far" to docs/target-app-parity.md, the gap list to docs/gaps.md, milestones to docs/roadmap.md, the .ai scope to docs/file-format-parity.md
2026-10-05 major Honest assessment by dimension and the prioritized gap list
2026-10-02 major First 22-area weighted parity estimate