vectorcraft/ROADMAP.md

VectorCraft Roadmap

VectorCraft is a clean-room, open-source, pure-Rust reimplementation of the Adobe Illustrator workflow. It runs on macOS, Windows, Linux and the web (WASM), and agents can drive it fully over a JSON control channel and MCP.

This file tracks how far we are and what's left. Time estimates are wall-clock hours of continuous Claude Opus 5.5 agent work (including builds and the CI gate), given both for one agent and for 4–6 parallel agents on disjoint crates. They are counted from the remaining work (see Parity estimate), calibrated against measured throughput, and updated as work lands.

Last updated: 2026-10-10 (after placed documents (File › Place of a .vectorcraft file, linked), M4.14–M4.98, M8.1–M8.20, M14.4–M14.7, the MCP prompts, resource templates, completions and logging, the 2026-10-07 issue fixes, the Layers panel rework and the 2026-10-08 community contributions: Pen and shape-tool modifiers, path editing, Layers, Artboards, Swatches/Brushes and dialogs, Japanese composition and PDF text, Hebrew/Arabic type, interface languages (Spanish among them), the font menu, saved selections, MCP and EPS, the missing-font export warning (#319), open paths in the Shape Builder (#374), PDF/.ai import keeping strokes live and hidden and nested layers (#372), per-corner Live Corners (#381), SVG type opening at the size it draws at (#396), the Wayland clipboard with copied-file paste (#398), ruler guides that can be selected, moved and deleted (#414), two batches of Preferences options that were stored but unused (#394), skeleton reads with document.find for large documents over MCP (#416) and anchors dragged with Direct Selection snapping to points, segments and smart guides, clipped SVG layers opening as clipping layers (#420), PDF/.ai layers read on pages of tens of millions of operators (#419), Document Color Mode putting RGB greys on the black plate on request and converting pattern tiles (#421) and movable dialogs with Offset Path's Joins dropdown (#423) and numeric fields scrubbed by dragging their label (#400), stroke weight presets in the stroke unit (#426), the Appearance panel's Opacity popup (#430), type on a path brackets, flip and Type on a Path Options that keep the type in place (#429), Layers rows dragged with a ghost and dropped on the trash or New Layer (#435), tool flyouts opening on a right or corner press (#436), tool flyouts torn off into floating toolbars (#437), the Shape Builder's erase mode deleting edges too (#439), installed fonts registered outside the font folders and fonts installed while the app runs listed in the font menus (#443), alike circular corners on rectangles that aren't square (#442), tool cursors as OS cursors so the pointer no longer trails over the canvas (#444), artboards copied and pasted with their art (#446), guides dragged out of the rulers snapping to the art's side midpoints and the artboards, artboard guides (#451), the toolbar's double arrow and Window › Toolbars › Double Column switching between one and two columns in any window height (#455), the Smart Guides display options and Snapping Tolerance (#394), Font Size and Leading combo boxes with preset lists in the Character and Properties panels and the Control bar (#458), screenshots pasted from the clipboard on macOS, Windows and the web (#457), the Properties panel's Fill and Stroke matching the Control bar's, Illustrator's Window menu panel keys (Shift+F7 for Align…) and Alt-wheel zoom whatever the wheel preference (Discord feedback), the point/area type widget (Discord feedback), groups in legacy Illustrator .ai files (Discord feedback), a rotating desktop log file (#465), image controls in the Control bar and Properties panel: Image Trace with its presets, Mask, Crop Image, Embed/Unembed, and an Image Trace object's preset, Expand and Release (Discord feedback), the Pen working as the Anchor Point tool with Alt held over a selected path's handles and anchors, and anchor buttons that convert, connect and cut paths at the selected anchors (Discord feedback), Japanese hanging punctuation (burasagari, #463), Escape leaving Presentation Mode with no screen mode saved across restarts, documents dropped on the desktop app opening as tabs of their own and a note that an .ai file's art off its artboards isn't in the part read (#472), Add/Delete Anchor Point tool icons drawn from the Pen tool's (#479), EPS import running more of PostScript Level 3 (patterns, Type 3 fonts, mesh shadings, masked images, VM and resource probes), and a preview that stands in saying why (Discord feedback, #466, #469, #474), chords with modifiers recorded in Edit › Keyboard Shortcuts (#487), Type Object Selection by Path Only (#394), Anti-aliased Artwork (#394), Show Pixel Grid (#394), pen and touch taps pressed and lifted within one frame clicking where they tapped and the Linux/Wayland pen-tablet workaround (#491), bounding-box resizes landing on the other objects' anchors and centres with labels, and the Rotate, Scale, Shear and Reflect tools snapping their drags (#482), Shift-drag marquees that toggle the objects or anchors they reach and a Lasso whose Alt subtraction keeps the rest of the selection (#483), the mouse wheel stepping the focused numeric field, the dialogs' and preferences' drag values made such fields (#485), Show The Home Screen When No Documents Are Open (#394), Numbers Without Units Are Points (#394), Auto-Collapse Iconic Panels (#394), the Contextual Task Bar moved by its handle and its More Options menu pinning and resetting its position, a designed macOS DMG window (#493), panels, panel groups and the Tools panel undocking into floating panels that move, stack and dock again (#495), the 0.5.0 startup crash on dual-GPU Linux desktops under Wayland fixed: the desktop's own GPU by default and a restart on the next GPU when one can't show the window (#502), path editing while drawing: Cmd/Ctrl with the Pen borrowing Direct Selection and drawing on afterwards, Pen+Alt reshaping segments, handles of a whole selected path dragging, and handle drags no longer re-gathering snap targets every move (#494), the Control bar's and Properties panel's Convert buttons for a path selected as a whole with Direct Selection, the Pen and the anchor tools (#504), the Pen closing a path dragged out of its first anchor every time, without flicker (#501), the Paste menu checking the system clipboard on a background thread on Linux so an X11 clipboard owner that never answers no longer freezes the window (#510), PDF/.ai import keeping a type object's outline stroke on the type, wrapped lines as area type, barcode digits in place and layers in the file's stacking order (#508), the Italian interface (#514), EPS images with several data sources read in turn (#498), restore undoing dictionary changes in EPS import (part of #505), the macOS menu bar laid out as a Mac app's (the VectorCraft menu with Settings, Language and Appearance, the system's Hide, Services and Window items; owner's request), Object › Image Trace › Make tracing with the Default preset instead of asking for a preset's name (#543), the rulers' unit menu (#528), Live Corners on stars, polygons and pen paths (#511), the drawing tools snapping to Smart Guides as the Selection tool does, with Construction Guides (#506), the in-window menus' Select All, Cut, Copy and Paste acting on the text field they were opened from (#516), Windows rendering through DX12 before Vulkan (#545), Image Trace tracing colour layers in parallel and refusing traces too large for memory, with the canvas outlining huge selections by their bounds (#525), SVGs of chosen artboards holding only the art over each artboard (#550), the font menu scrolling only its list, under a search field and filters that stay put (#555), a click on an object of a selection making it the key object that Align aligns to and Distribute Spacing spaces from, drawn with a thicker outline (#541), Shape Builder merges taken from the planar map itself, so merged regions leave no inner edge, hairline gap or spur in their outline (#569), .ai written by the exports and the CLI (--export, convert) as Save As writes it (#526), SVG round trips keeping hidden objects and data-* attributes (#522), the gradient stop popover staying open after the click that opens it from the Gradient panel (#577), standard ligatures kept under small tracking and dropped only past about −8% / +22% of a word space or when the character asks for them (#583), the Color panel keeping its height as warnings come and go so a drag on its spectrum no longer flickers near white (#578), fonts that font services such as Adobe Fonts load on Windows, listed through DirectWrite (#579), .ai files writing their layers and sublayers as PDF layers, hidden ones with their art, and PDF layers nested in layers importing as sublayers (#372), file dialogs on Linux shown off the UI thread so the compositor no longer finds the window not responding, and parented to the window on Linux and Windows (#592), anchors and handle ends picked from 2 px past their drawn size before the segments through them (#593), an image copied in a browser pasting as the picture, not its address (#597), the Free Transform widget with Constrain, Free Transform, Perspective Distort and Free Distort (#598), touch gestures: a two-finger tap undoes and a three-finger tap redoes (#585), the font menus' live preview staying on the text instead of flickering on and off every frame (#563), Edit Artboards showing the active artboard in the Properties panel with New Artboard, Delete Artboard and Exit (#530), the same DirectWrite fonts in vectorcraft-cli and its MCP server (#579), SVG layers keeping their names when wrapped and sublayers round-tripping through SVG (#372), a Layers panel that lays out only the rows in view and keeps a document's open rows in its file (#638), a panel dropped on the dock lights up the icon column it goes back to and pops out of its icon (#649), Image Trace's View modes and an Advanced section that stays as it was left (part of #641), Image Trace's Palette: Limited, Full Tone, Automatic and Document Library (part of #641), Image Trace's Create Strokes: line art traced as stroked centre lines (part of #641), a dual-GPU Mac falling back to its other GPU when one fails to start (#651), two fingers dragged on a touch screen panning the canvas (part of #449), the Home screen's Recent Files and a double-clicked New Document preset creating the document (part of #663), quitting no longer crashing on Macs with a Touch Bar (#661), Animated Zoom, Large Tabs, Scale Cursor Proportional to UI and anti-aliased bitmaps in Pixel Preview acting (part of #394), Smart Guides › Spacing Guides (part of #394), Edit Artboards' Properties choosing an artboard's size preset and flipping it between portrait and landscape (#671), Preferences › Type › Additional Fonts Folder loading the fonts of a folder you choose (#683), Canvas Color's light, medium and dark grey (part of #663), a document tab's close box after its title on Windows and Linux, before it on macOS (part of #673), Rearrange All Artboards' layouts (a grid by row or by column, one row, one column) and right-to-left order, one click away in the Properties and Artboards panels (#681), User Interface › Show Tool Group Labels and Cmd+, opening Settings on the Mac (part of #663), the Windows taskbar and Alt+Tab showing VectorCraft's icon, a click with a selection tool making its artboard the active one, and Paste in Place, in Front and in Back pasting onto the active artboard (#693), Photoshop-style raster effects on a pixel-filter pipeline: Effect › Blur › Radial Blur and Smart Blur, Effect › Sharpen › Unsharp Mask (part of gap 2), the Properties panel's number fields all one width (#696), the rotate cursor drawn as a curved double arrow (#701), the Templates folder in the desktop's own documents folder, made when missing (#703), PDF and .ai glyphs whose ToUnicode names no character (U+FFFD) taking their character from the embedded font or keeping their outlines, with a warning (#708), Illustrator EPS and .ai files opening from their editing data with their colours, gradients, transparency, images, names and every artboard (part of #637), .ai files saved without PDF compatibility opening from their editing data (part of #637), guides left out of raster exports and Fit to Artwork Bounds, hidden art left out of Fit to Artwork Bounds, Illustrator files compared with their page object by object, and editingData: false opening only what the page prints (#735), art reaching past a PDF's page clipped to its crop box (#675), Package collecting what placed documents link to (#777), area type, threaded type and type on a path made whole from Illustrator files' text documents (part of #637), the missing-fonts dialog with Find Fonts and a folder search (#792), Effect › Stylize › Glowing Edges (#765), Offset Path's Joins and Zig Zag's Points as dropdowns and Relative/Absolute as radio buttons in the effect dialogs (#828), the control channel's app.quit reporting a pending save prompt (#830), blurred type that stays put while the view moves (#755), Windows starting on Direct3D 12 and loading no Vulkan driver unless asked (#806), the Artboard tool naming its artboard once (#824), Save for Web taking typed pixel sizes (#839), rulers ticked over their whole length in a rotated view (#826), the gradient stop popover opening beside the art (#862) and recent colours recolouring the selected stop (#835), every align button following Align To (#789), the Properties panel's Paragraph section with all seven alignments and Hyphenate (#775), isolation mode dimming and locking the art around the isolated group (#833), color books (.acb) opening as swatch libraries (#831), files that can't be opened reported in a dialog (#861), run and command_batch steps using earlier steps' results (#785), ruler guides pulling drawn points with Smart Guides on and Smart Guides labelling centres and anchors on hover (#812), shadows and glows keeping their blend modes in PDF (#827) and .ai import skipping layer checks that can't succeed (#758), the Curvature tool editing any selected path (#798), raster exports composited in floating point so translucent edges over opaque art stay opaque (#787), Calligraphic and Bristle Brush Options with pen-pressure Calligraphic brushes (part of #852), a polygon's Polygon Properties in the Properties and Transform panels, Flare Tool Options that last and more tools opening their options on a double-click (part of #812), MCP file access confined with --automation-read-root / --automation-write-root (#832), the Transform effect's dialog with the reference point, Random, sliders and an angle dial (part of #885), artboard X/Y edits in the Properties and Transform panels and Artboard Options taking their art along with Move Artwork with Artboard (#922), Effect › Pixelate's Color Halftone, Crystallize, Mezzotint and Pointillize (part of gap 2), linked files changed while the app was in the background following Update Links when its window comes back to the front (#925), the Tabs panel's Leader and Align On fields keeping what is typed until Enter (#924), the Properties panel's Gradient section with the gradient's type and a freeform gradient's Draw (Points or Lines) while the Gradient tool is active (#921), PSD and PSB files opened and placed, linked or embedded, as their merged image (#918); see Honest assessment).

Where we are

Dimension	Status
Infrastructure (engine, command registry, history, render, formats, MCP, web, packaging, tests)	~90%
Look & feel vs Illustrator 2026 default workspace (measured)	~75–80%
Feature surface vs full Illustrator (weighted, see below)	~75% on the rubric · 69–75% honest range (self-graded, see Honest assessment)
Parity including interaction fidelity and hardening ("a power user can't tell the difference, but faster")	~40–55%
Time to feature parity (every menu item, tool, panel, effect and dialog functional)	~210–330 h one agent · ~55–95 h with 4–6 agents
Time to full parity (feature parity + interaction-fidelity pass + hardening)	~320–500 h one agent · ~80–145 h with 4–6 agents

Honest assessment (2026-10-05)

In one line: about two-thirds to three-quarters of Illustrator's features exist and work, and for everyday vector illustration (drawing, paths, paint and appearance, SVG/PDF/print) VectorCraft is close to usable. Measured against "a power user can't tell the difference", it is closer to 40–55%. What stands between here and "anyone can switch" is a handful of large subsystems plus a fidelity pass, not a long tail of small fixes.

How much to trust the numbers: area scores are graded by the agents that built the features, from behaviour docs (plan/illustrator/) and tests, not by side-by-side use of Illustrator. Treat them as upper bounds. Look & feel is the only dimension measured against the reference app. Performance budgets haven't been re-run on an idle machine since 2026-10-01.

By dimension

Dimension	Estimate	Evidence and what's missing
Breadth: menus, tools and panels exist	~90%	13 menu items still stubbed; every tool implemented except Touch Type; 51 panel modules
Depth: each feature behaves like Illustrator	~69–75%	Strong: paint, appearance and colour (M3), Pathfinder and booleans, selection, drawing, files (M4). Weak: advanced type (~45%; inline symbols in text are beyond parity and don't raise it), brushes and symbols (in progress), raster effects (~20%)
Large missing subsystems	0–20%	3D & Materials (0%), Photoshop-style raster effects and the Effect Gallery (~8 of ~56 filters), SVG Filters, CJK composition (vertical type with kinsoku, tate-chu-yoko and the font's vertical metrics; ruby, mojikumi and proportional vertical metrics open), Variables (data merge), scripting
Interaction fidelity: modifiers, cursors, small behaviours	~30–40%	The dedicated pass hasn't started, and there has been no side-by-side session with Illustrator yet. A power user notices this first
Look & feel	~75–80%	Measured against Illustrator 2026 screenshots (2026-10-02); the panels added since haven't been re-measured
File interop	~85%	SVG/SVGZ, PDF and PDF-compatible .ai, EPS, DXF, EMF/WMF, raster formats, PSD export and PSD/PSB placement (merged image), Place and Links, Package, Print, clipboard flavours. Affinity documents (Affinity 1–3) open natively as editable art, checked against 51 pinned public files (33 current .af), with selected saved-thumbnail comparisons and every-board native/SVG/PDF/PSD checks for current files; Affinity export is missing and effects, adjustments and brushes don't import. Affinity isn't an Illustrator feature, so this doesn't raise the parity score. The editing copy inside an Illustrator EPS or .ai is read for its structure: layers, groups, names, hidden objects and type, colours, gradients, transparency, images and every artboard (see Out of scope for what it doesn't read yet); DWG has no open spec
Bundled content: brush, symbol, style and swatch libraries	~30%	Ours are original and generated in code, and far fewer than Illustrator ships; brush and symbol libraries are still missing
Performance	unverified	Multithreaded, off-thread rendering and caches are in place. The last budget run (2026-10-01, loaded machine) measured 290 ms for a 50k-path fit against a 16 ms budget. Re-run vectorcraft-cli perf on an idle machine
Robustness	good, new	~2,840 tests, property tests, no panics in shipped code (lints, the guard safety net, import fuzzing), Data Recovery. Missing: a corpus of real-world files, Windows/Linux/browser QA
Platforms and 1.0 polish	~60%	The macOS app and the web build work, and Finder opens every readable format with the macOS app (#295, #354); on macOS the menus are in the system menu bar, laid out as a Mac app's, with the in-window menus as a fallback (--in-window-menus; verified on Windows and by cross-compilation, not yet by hand on a Mac); hybrid-graphics laptops render on the power-saving GPU by default on Windows and macOS (#306), and Windows starts on Direct3D 12, falling back to OpenGL, and loads no Vulkan driver unless WGPU_BACKEND asks for it (#545: Vulkan flickered black on an Intel GPU, DX12 and OpenGL didn't; #806: a faulty Vulkan driver crashed the app before its window appeared; verified by unit tests and the reporter's runs with WGPU_BACKEND), and Linux on the GPU the desktop runs on, since a Wayland compositor may refuse frames from the other one; a window that fails on its GPU while starting up starts again on the next one instead of crashing (#502; the dual-GPU Wayland case is verified by unit tests and cross-compilation, not on such hardware); web drops land in the document they were dropped on (#359); desktop drops carry no pointer position (winit 0.30), so a dropped document opens as a tab of its own and a picture or text is placed in the middle of the view, while the web places anything dropped on the canvas and opens what is dropped off it, as Illustrator does (#472); a web page that loses its WebGPU device or WebGL context restarts its graphics with the same documents (#369); on Linux/Wayland the clipboard reads the compositor's own (data-control) and copied image files paste, but files can't be dropped on the window under Wayland until eframe moves to winit 0.31 (#398; the Wayland side is verified by compilation only); on Linux the Paste menu checks the system clipboard on a background thread, so a clipboard owner that never answers no longer freezes the window, while Windows and macOS keep their quick in-line check (#510; the X11 hang verified by the contributor, here by headless tests); on KDE Plasma 6.3+ under Wayland, pens and pen displays reach the app only under XWayland (WAYLAND_DISPLAY=) or with KWin's KWIN_WAYLAND_EMULATE_TABLET=1, since winit 0.30 has no Wayland tablet input (#491, not verified on hardware); Windows/Linux packaging and accessibility are pending; an experimental, unsupported Windows 7 x64 OpenGL build exists (community-contributed, not verified by maintainers)
Agent automation	beyond Illustrator	Every command, gesture and dialog is drivable over MCP, the CLI and the control channel; what an agent reads and writes on disk can be confined to chosen folders (--automation-read-root / --automation-write-root, as in PhotoCraft, #832)
Scrubby numeric fields	beyond Illustrator	As in Photoshop, dragging a numeric field's label (W:, Opacity:, the Character panel's icons) left or right steps its value live; one undo step per drag, Escape cancels (#400)

Where we're lacking (in priority order)

Ordered by how much each gap blocks someone from switching. Sizes are one-agent hours from the parity table.

1. Interaction fidelity: go tool by tool and panel by panel against plan/illustrator/05-tools.md, 06-panels.md and 09-shortcuts.md, covering modifier keys, cursors, the Properties panel per context and isolation mode. The Shaper’s rough-square recognition and shape orientation steps are corrected; Shaper Groups now retain editable originals for region merges/punches and separate fill/stroke edits; their construction-mode widget and gesture refinements remain. 60–90 h.
2. Photoshop-style raster effects and the Effect Gallery: about 47 filters (Artistic, Brush Strokes, Distort, Sketch, Stylize, Texture, Video) and the Effect Gallery. The pixel-filter pipeline is in place (vectorcraft_effects::pixel: the object rendered offscreen, filtered in stack order with Gaussian Blur and Feather, cached while panning, images in PDF/SVG/Expand Appearance) with Blur › Radial Blur and Smart Blur (Normal mode only), Pixelate › Color Halftone, Crystallize, Mezzotint and Pointillize, Sharpen › Unsharp Mask and Stylize › Glowing Edges; each new filter is now one function, a catalogue row, menu and translations. Parallelizes well across agents. 24–37 h.
3. 3D and Materials: Extrude & Bevel, Revolve, Inflate and Rotate with lighting and materials, using a software renderer in its own crate (layering allows it below L6), with output in SVG/PDF as rasters or projected vectors. The largest single gap. 50–80 h.
4. Advanced type: CJK composition for vertical type (ruby, mojikumi, proportional vertical metrics, manual tate-chu-yoko), Optical Margin Alignment, the hyphenation and justification options (the Every-line/Single-line composer choice is done), tab leaders, a spell-check dictionary (open licence), Touch Type and Snap to Glyph. Vertical point, area and path type have initial support. 34–47 h across type core and advanced.
5. Brushes, symbols and libraries: brush options depth (Scatter, Art and Pattern Brush Options; Calligraphic and Bristle are done, Calligraphic with pen pressure); original brush, symbol and graphic-style libraries generated in code (never Adobe's); dynamic symbols; Start Global Edit; brushes driven by pen tilt, bearing and barrel rotation (6D art pens, #372), which needs tablet input beyond pressure on every platform. 20–32 h.
6. Automation: Variables (data merge), a scripting surface over the command registry, batch. 8–12 h.
7. Views and windows: multiple windows and arrange, Consolidate All Windows, video rulers. 15–25 h.
8. Hardening at scale: a corpus of real-world SVG/PDF/EPS files, Affinity files from more versions and platforms (51 pinned files now include 28 original Affinity 3.2.3 feature probes; large interacting documents, complex typography and independently paired .af/PSD renders reopened in Affinity remain missing), idle-machine perf budgets, Windows, Linux and browser QA, pen tablets on Wayland and pen pressure beyond Windows (winit 0.31's tablet input, #491), accessibility, packaging. 50–80 h.

Where we're going

• Next: start the interaction-fidelity pass (1) in parallel with the raster-effects package (2). Both are broad, so they split well across agents, and they move the "can't tell the difference" number most.
• Then: 3D (3) and advanced type (4), each a focused milestone with its own plan in plan/ before coding.
• Alongside: keep closing the stubbed menu items. Run vectorcraft-cli perf on an idle machine, and fix any budget it misses before 1.0.
• 1.0: feature parity plus the fidelity pass, hardening (8) and packaging for all three desktop OSes and the web.

For agents: pick work from the list above (or the milestone rows below), and write a task plan before coding. When a task lands, update this section, the parity table and "Shipped so far" in the same PR. Keep the scores honest: grade by behaviour against plan/illustrator/, not by whether a menu item exists.

Shipped so far

• Architecture: 19+ crates with enforced layering (cargo xtask layers). Every action is a command (~400 engine + ~50 UI). Undo is unlimited via structural sharing. command.batch runs several commands as one transaction.
• Automation:
  • Actions panel (record/playback, persisted), generic parameter dialogs for every "…" command.
  • JSON-lines control channel with real egui pointer and keyboard injection.
  • MCP server with 25 tools (drawing, text, effects, Pathfinder, transforms, graphs, text wrap, export, screenshots, any command), attached to the running app or headless. Tool descriptions and replies agree with the engine: format lists come from its format table, save_file says it keeps the document's own format, inspect_document reports the paint type's characters show, and selection exports report the encoder's warnings. --automation-read-root / --automation-write-root (on vectorcraft-cli mcp and on vectorcraft --control) confine the files commands read and write to chosen folders, links followed, with the flags PhotoCraft takes (#832).
  • MCP protocol: five prompts (prompts/list / prompts/get: poster, icon set, recolour, trace-and-style, export set), completion/complete for prompt arguments and template variables read from the live catalogues (formats, effect ids, command ids, trace presets, swatch and object ids), four resource templates (vectorcraft://object/{id}, //command/{id}, //effect/{id}, //swatch/{name}) so an agent reads one thing instead of the whole document, and logging/setLevel with notifications/message. window.panel ids are case-insensitive (display labels work too), vectorcraft://object/{id} reads through document.node {summary: true} (the same reply bytes from one lookup instead of summarizing the whole document: a leaf read on a 2,000-object document drops from ~20 ms to ~0.06 ms), large containers slice with document.node {depth?, childLimit?} (truncated levels report childCount), document.inspect and the inspect_document tool slice the same way so a depth-0 read is the layer skeleton (~9.7 KB instead of ~2 MB on a 2,000-object document), document.find locates nodes by name/kind/text with ancestor paths, and the CLI sweeps the protocol surface over stdio against the compiled binary. docs/mcp.md has a Protocol section covering the capability table and what is deliberately absent (subscriptions, progress, cancellation, sampling, elicitation, Streamable HTTP — all of which need the transport to interleave reads).
  • Headless CLI (vectorcraft-cli run, convert, info, bench, perf, mcp). A run step, like a command_batch step over MCP, can use an earlier step's result ("$1.id", #785).
  • Actions panel that records and plays back commands.
• UI: Illustrator 2026 layout restyled to measured values:
  • Medium Dark theme, categorized and Advanced toolbars (a tool group's flyout opens on a right press, a long press or a press on its corner triangle), 35 pt document tabs, 33 pt panel tabs.
  • Hint bar, contextual task bar, 19 dock panels with ≡ menus.
  • The contextual task bar's handle drags it anywhere on the canvas (kept whole on it as the window resizes); unpinned it keeps that offset as it follows the selection, and its More Options menu hides it, pins its position across selection changes (window.taskBar.pin), resets it under the selection (window.taskBar.reset) and shows the Properties panel. As in Illustrator the position isn't kept across launches. Not done: the bar's tool-specific variants (only the selection tools show it).
  • Tool flyouts tear off: dragging or clicking the tear-off bar on a flyout's right side (or releasing the long press over it) floats its group as a strip of tool buttons, moved by the same bar and put back in the toolbar by the × at its top (window.floatTools). While a group floats, the presses that would open its flyout raise the strip instead. Floating strips are kept with the preferences and in user workspaces. Not done: turning a strip vertical, docking it.
  • Panels undock (#495): a dock tab, a panel icon or a popped-out panel's title dragged out of the dock floats that panel inside the window, and the strip right of the dock's tabs floats the whole tabbed group. A floating group moves by its title bar, a tab dragged out of it floats on its own, and dropped on another group's title bar or tabs it stacks with that group; dropped on the dock, which lights up under the pointer, its panels go back where they live (the tabbed group or the icon column), as its × and the panel menus' Float Panel / Dock Panel do (window.panel.float, window.panel.dock). The Tools panel floats by its title bar and docks again on the window's left edge. Floating panels and the Tools panel's position are kept with the preferences and in user workspaces, and clamped into a smaller window. Not done: panels in separate OS windows, docking a panel into a dock group it doesn't belong to, reordering tabs by dragging, collapsing a floating group to icons, resizing floating panels.
  • The dock's double arrow collapses Properties, Layers and Libraries to icons at the top of the icon column, popping out like the other icon panels, and expands them again (window.collapseDock, kept with the preferences and in saved workspaces). The icon column's own arrow (expanding the icon panels into a full column) is not done.
  • Localised UI: menus (in-window and native), panels, dialogs, toolbar and Preferences read from per-language catalogs (crates/ui-egui/src/i18n, see docs/development.md); Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), Simplified Chinese (mainland), Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian and Ukrainian ship complete, and Czech and Brazilian Portuguese cover every menu label (and more), with system-locale detection on macOS, Windows, Linux and the web (the browser's languages, or ?lang=), a VectorCraft ▸ Language menu and a Language preference. Names are never translated (fonts and their styles, layers, artboards, saved presets, user libraries, custom workspaces, recent files, plug-ins).
  • Native macOS menu bar, vector tool cursors, a ⌘K command palette, middle-button panning with any tool. Native menus explicitly end tracking on command selection, outside window presses and Escape; menu updates wait until tracking ends, and a dismissing press never starts a canvas gesture (M14.8).
  • The macOS menu bar is built from the in-window menus (one model, native_menu) and laid out as a Mac app's: the VectorCraft menu holds About, Settings ▸ (each Preferences page, General… ⌘K), Language ▸, Appearance ▸ (UI brightness), Services, Hide VectorCraft ⌃⌘H (⌘H stays Hide Edges), Hide Others, Show All and Quit; Window gains Minimize ⌃⌘M, Zoom and Bring All to Front, and Help the system's search field. Its key equivalents go back to egui as key presses, so user shortcuts, focused text fields and the Type tool's input method behave as in the window, and nothing fires twice; enabled, check marks and labels update in place. --in-window-menus or VECTORCRAFT_IN_WINDOW_MENUS=1 keeps the menus in the window; ui.inspect reports nativeMenuBar.
  • macOS: Finder opens every format File › Open reads with VectorCraft (double-click, Open With, a drop on the Dock icon, open -a), at launch or while it runs; the release and cargo xtask bundle apps share one Info.plist that declares those document types, owning only VectorCraft's own formats. The DMG opens on a designed Finder window, VectorCraft.app beside the Applications link over a background with the app icon (#493).
  • A canvas context menu: right-click selects the object under the pointer and lists what applies to the selection (Undo/Redo, clipboard, group, isolation, join, Remove Anchor Points when anchors are selected, masks, compound paths, guides, Transform, Arrange, Select, Export Selection), or the view commands on empty canvas.
  • Save / Don't Save / Cancel before closing or quitting with unsaved documents (tabs, Close, Close All, Quit, window close).
  • Four brightness themes, persistent preferences.
  • Preferences that act (#394, in part): Show Tool Tips, Double Click To Isolate, Zoom with Mouse Wheel (the wheel zooms about the pointer, Shift-wheel scrolls up and down, Cmd/Ctrl-wheel sideways; Alt/Option-wheel and a trackpad pinch zoom about the pointer either way), Use Precise Cursors; Selection & Anchor Display › Tolerance (objects, anchors and handles), Object Selection by Path Only, Command Click to Select Objects Behind (cycling down the stack), Zoom to Selection, anchor Size, Highlight anchors on mouse over; Type › Number of Recent Fonts (up to 15); Guides & Grid › guide and grid Color and Style (lines or dots) and Grids In Back. Then Snap to Point (its distance, for moves, drawn points and reference points), Move Locked and Hidden Artwork with Artboard, Enable Rubber Band for the Pen and Curvature tools, Handles style, Show handles when multiple anchors are selected, Hide Corner Widget for angles greater than; General › Transform Pattern Tiles (the transforms' and dialogs' Transform Patterns) and Select Same Tint %; Type › Size/Leading, Tracking and Baseline Shift increments (type.step, Cmd+Shift+. and Cmd+Shift+, for the size, the Type tool's Alt+arrows), Enable Missing Glyph Protection and Fill New Type Objects With Placeholder Text. Then Smart Guides › Color, Alignment Guides, Anchor/Path Labels, Measurement Labels, Transform Tools, Object Highlighting (with Smart Guides on) and Snapping Tolerance (4 px by default, for every smart guide snap), then Construction Guides and their Angles (#506: a drawn point near a line at one of those angles through the point it leaves from lands on it). Then Type › Type Object Selection by Path Only (type is picked on the baseline of any of its lines, area type's frame or the path of type on a path, no longer anywhere in its bounds; the Type tools and the Eyedropper still take a click among the characters). Then General › Anti-aliased Artwork (off, the canvas draws the art with hard edges). Then Guides & Grid › Show Pixel Grid (Above 600% Zoom), a line at every document pixel over the art in Pixel Preview, turning with a rotated view as the document grid now does too. Then General › Show The Home Screen When No Documents Are Open (off, closing the last document leaves an empty window; the Home button still opens the screen). Then Units › Numbers Without Units Are Points (on by default: a number typed with no unit into a field in picas is read in points, a typed unit still wins; dimmed unless a unit is Picas). Then User Interface › Auto-Collapse Iconic Panels (off by default: on, a click away from a panel popped out of the icon column puts it away). Then Performance › Animated Zoom (on, with GPU Performance, which it needs and which dims it when off: the Zoom tool dragged sideways zooms about the press, right in and left out, and held still zooms on, Alt out; off, a drag zooms to the area dragged across, now drawn as a marquee), User Interface › Large Tabs (taller document tabs) and Scale Cursor Proportional to UI (off, the tool cursors keep their size whatever the UI Scaling), and File Handling › Display Bitmaps as Anti-aliased Images in Pixel Preview (off by default: Pixel Preview draws images with each pixel taking its nearest image pixel). Type › Auto Size New Area Type works too (new area type gets Auto Size). They reach agents too (prefs.set, then pointer_gesture or press_key; ui.wheel on the control channel). Then Smart Guides › Spacing Guides (moves space the selection evenly with its row or column, see Drawing aids). Then Hyphenation › Exceptions (comma-separated words that never break, or break only at their hyphens; prefs.set and restore push them into the hyphenator, #394). Then Type › Show Font Names in English (off, font menus label a family by its native-language name when the font has one; documents still use the English family, #394). Then General › Display Print Size at 100% Zoom (off by default: View › Actual Size is one document point per screen point; on, one document inch fills 96 screen points, an inch at the reference density display scaling is set against; view.actualSize / prefs.set, #394). About 17 stored options still do nothing yet (the rest of #394: Highlight Alternate Glyphs, Identify Objects By, East Asian Type units, Open Documents As Tabs, Real-time Drawing and Editing, GPU Performance beyond Animated Zoom, hyphenation language, scratch disks, the legacy clipboard, Appearance of Black, Touch Workspace).
  • Dialogs move by dragging their heading (the band down from the top edge, as a title bar), stay on screen and keep where they were moved for the session; the form dialogs' choices are dropdowns (Offset Path's Joins, Average's and Shear's and Reflect's axis), and Offset Path lists Offset, Joins, Miter Limit and previews (#423).
  • Dialogs open with their first field focused and its value selected: type a value and press Enter (Move, Rotate, Scale…). Number fields in panels, the Control bar and dialogs (preferences too) step with Up/Down, or with the mouse wheel over the focused field (#485: a notch a step; the panel under it then stays put, and an unfocused field leaves the wheel to scrolling) (Shift: ten, Ctrl/Cmd: a tenth of their unit), applied at once.
  • Scrubby labels (#400, beyond Illustrator, as in Photoshop): dragging a numeric field's label left or right (the ↔ cursor shows over it) steps the value one unit every 2 points (Shift: ten, Ctrl/Cmd: a tenth; counts stay whole), in the field's unit and within its limits, applied live as the art follows; the whole drag is one undo step and Escape puts the value back. A click on the label focuses the field; the text box itself never scrubs, and a field with no label doesn't. Text labels before a field (Transform, Properties, Control bar, Stroke, Transparency, form rows in dialogs) and the Character and Paragraph panels' icons act as labels. Preferences › General › Scrub Numeric Fields by Dragging (on by default) turns it off.
  • The Control bar's underlined Transform link opens the Transform panel in a popover under it (reference point, X/Y/W/H, Rotate and Shear with their icons and angle presets, flips, shape properties, Scale Corners and Scale Strokes & Effects), as its Stroke link does the Stroke panel; X/Y/W/H also show inline while the bar has room. The reference point locator is nine squares, the outer eight joined around the box.
  • Tab shows and hides the panels (in the Type tool it types a tab) without moving the keyboard focus onto a field, so the next shortcut or letter still works; in dialogs and panel fields it moves between fields.
  • Cmd/Ctrl+A follows the keyboard: in a panel, dialog or search field it selects the field's text, while the Type tool edits it selects all of that text (also select.all over MCP), and only otherwise every object. On macOS the menu bar's Select All, Cut, Copy and Paste (keys or clicks) act on a focused field too, and elsewhere the in-window menus' do: the field that had the keyboard when the menu opened gets them, with its selection, and the keyboard back (#516). Not yet: Select All across threaded frames (one frame's text is selected).
  • On Windows and Linux the app bar is the window's title bar (its own minimize, maximize and close buttons, drag to move, edges to resize), with the dragon app icon as the brand mark; dialogs and menus size to their content. As on a native menu bar, once one menu is open, moving the pointer onto another title opens that one.
• Tools:
  • Shaper: uneven squares and rectangles become live rectangles even when drawing begins mid-edge. Recognition uses uniformly spaced samples and closed-loop corners, fits rectangle edges/angles rather than requiring a nearly perfect bounding-box fill, and includes the pointer-release position. Rectangles/squares and ellipses snap to 45° steps, hexagons to 90°, and triangles point up or down; lines keep their free angle even with Shift. Shaper Groups retain the live originals, merge regions with the gesture-origin fill, punch fills independently from strokes, remove boundaries on exiting scribbles and trim protruding stroke pieces. Source moves/resizes re-evaluate the result in the same undo step; double-click enters construction editing. Native save/reopen, face recoloring, Release and Expand are covered. The construction-mode widget and finer gesture heuristics remain.
  • Selection: Selection, Direct/Group Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso. A Shift-drag marquee toggles what it reaches: objects with the Selection tool, anchors with Direct and Group Selection (#483); the Lasso adds with Shift and subtracts with Alt. Dragging a path segment with Direct Selection bends it when it's curved (its anchors stay) and moves its two anchors when it's straight, one undo step; the fill, Shift or Alt still pick the whole path (Alt-drag copies it). Agent selection commands validate every object id before changing the selection and report the resulting count and ids (#784). Clear deletes individual selected compound-path members without deleting their siblings, and explicit object ids work without a selection; Cut still removes the same objects it copies (#786).
  • Saved selections: Select ▸ Save Selection… asks for a name and keeps the selection in the document (saved with the file, undoable, up to 25); each one is listed at the bottom of the Select menu and a click selects its objects again; Edit Selection… lists them to rename or delete, applied together on OK. A file's saved selections are capped and checked against its objects when it opens. Not yet: Update Selection and the Layers panel's saved-selection menu.
  • Drawing: Pen, Curvature, anchor tools, Pencil, Paintbrush, Blob Brush, Smooth, Path Eraser, Join. Direction handles dragged with Direct Selection or the Anchor Point tool snap to smart guides, and Shift keeps them at 45° steps from their anchor. The Pen continues any open path from the end clicked, and while drawing, a click on an end of another open path joins the two into one (#776). The Curvature tool edits any selected path, whatever drew it, keeping its shape except where edited (#798): a click on a point makes it current and a drag moves it, re-curving only its two segments; Alt-click or double-click toggles it smooth or corner and Delete removes it; a click on a segment adds a point without changing the shape; with an end of an open path current, clicks go on from it and its other end closes it (path.curvatureEdit). Every point a drawing tool places snaps to Smart Guides through one snapper (#506): the Pen's and Curvature tool's anchors, the Pencil's ends, the shape tools' start and dragged corner or radius (Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Star, Line Segment, Arc, Spiral, the grids), the Type tool's click and frame, a new artboard's corners.
  • Shapes: all shape tools (including Flare) and the line, arc, spiral and grid tools. Space held while dragging out a shape, line, arc, spiral or grid moves it at its current size. While a grid is dragged out, Up/Down change its rows (concentric dividers) and Left/Right its columns (radial dividers). An ellipse's Pie Start and End Angle and Invert Pie (Transform and Properties panels' Ellipse Properties, object.setLiveShape {pieStart, pieEnd, invertPie}) cut it as a pie (#812; the on-canvas pie widget is still to come). A live polygon's Polygon Properties there: side count, angle, corner type and radius, radius, side length and Make Sides Equal once an uneven scale has made its sides differ (object.setLiveShape {sides, polygonAngle, polygonRadius, sideLength, makeSidesEqual}, part of #812); a star is a plain path, as in Illustrator. The Flare Tool Options last as the tool's options: the next flare dragged out uses them, a click's dialog shows them and double-clicking the tool opens them (part of #812).
  • Cutting: Eraser, Scissors, Knife, Mirror & Cut, Line Cut and Rectangle Cut (real geometry, compound paths keep their holes).
  • Transform: Rotate, Reflect, Scale, Shear (click or Alt-click snaps the reference point to anchors and centres; Alt-click opens the tool's dialog, and a drag with Alt down at the release, from the press or pressed mid-drag, transforms a copy), Reshape, Free Transform (free and perspective distort and shear, switched by the keys held during a handle drag).
  • Live Corners: drag a live rectangle's corner widgets (Selection or Direct Selection) to round all corners, with a radius readout; with Direct Selection, select corner anchors to show and round just those corners (#381). Each corner keeps its own radius and kind (Round, Inverted Round, Chamfer): Alt-click a widget to cycle the kind, double-click it for the Corners dialog, and the Properties and Transform radius fields set the selected corners (object.setLiveShape {corners, radius, kind}). Corners stay circular when the rectangle is scaled unevenly or along its own sides when rotated (the radius keeps its size, or scales by the mean scale with Scale Corners on); only a shear distorts them. On a rectangle that isn't square every corner is the same circle: a radius past half the shorter side stops there for all of them, the widgets sit on the corners as drawn and turn the edited corners red at that limit, CSS export writes the drawn radii, and rectangles saved stretched by older versions get circular corners when their corners are next set (#442). Live Corners work on any path's corners too, as on a rectangle's (#511): a star's, a live polygon's (which also shows them to the Selection tool, has a Corner Radius field in the Properties and Transform panels and keeps its radius as its sides change) and a pen path's, wherever two straight sides meet at an anchor. Direct Selection shows the widgets of every corner, or of the corners holding selected anchors; each corner is a circle tangent to both sides, drawn no larger than takes its cut halfway along its shorter side; a path keeps its uncut outline so its corners stay editable, and the same command, dialog, angle preference and View › Hide Corner Widget apply.
  • Pen: Alt pressed in the middle of dragging out an anchor splits its handles and keeps the curve already shaped into it (only the outgoing handle follows the pointer); Space held while dragging out an anchor moves it, handles and all. A press on the first anchor of the path being drawn closes it whatever the drag then does: the drag shapes the closing curve (symmetric handles, Alt breaks them) and the release closes the path wherever it ends (#501). Clicking the last anchor of the path being drawn retracts its outgoing handle (convert cursor), and dragging from it pulls out a new one on its own. Auto Add/Delete: over a selected path, a click on a segment adds an anchor and a click on an anchor deletes it (add and delete cursors); Shift held, or Preferences › General › Disable Auto Add/Delete, starts a new path instead. Alt held over a handle end or an anchor of a selected path (the one being drawn too) works as the Anchor Point tool, with its convert cursor: dragging a handle moves it alone, clicking a smooth anchor makes it a corner, dragging an anchor pulls out new symmetric handles, dragging a segment reshapes it; drawing then goes on. Cmd (Ctrl) held drags with the selection tool chosen last, Direct Selection until one is (handles, anchors and segments of the path being drawn or another), and the Pen then goes on drawing its path while that stays selected; the pointer shows that tool's while Cmd is held. The same holds for agents (pointer_gesture with mods.cmd), as the borrowing now lives in the engine (#494).
  • Path editing (#494): the handles shown are the handles that drag: Direct Selection drags those of a path selected as a whole (as the Pen leaves it), the Anchor Point tool and Pen+Alt no longer grab handles that Show handles when multiple anchors are selected hides, a handle shorter than the tolerance leaves its anchor to be picked, and the anchor tools pick within Selection & Anchor Display › Tolerance. A dragged segment keeps a smooth anchor at either end smooth. With Direct Selection, the Pen, the Curvature and the anchor tools, a path selected as a whole shows all its anchors selected, and the Control bar and the Properties panel offer Convert (corner, smooth) for them too; Remove and Cut wait for anchors direct-selected (#504). A handle drag gathers its snap targets once per drag (it took 21 ms per pointer move on a 20,000-path document, now 1 ms; vectorcraft-cli perf measures handle and segment drags on a 5,000-anchor path).
  • Graphs: Column, Stacked Column, Bar, Stacked Bar, Line, Area, Scatter, Pie and Radar graph tools with Graph Data and Graph Type. A series starts in greyscale; Group Selection's fill and stroke are kept separately on the graph and reapplied when its data, type or size changes, and through save, open and undo. Graph Design, Column and Marker artwork remain open.
  • Other: Eyedropper, Gradient annotator, Artboard (Alt-drag duplicates an artboard, and its art with Move/Copy Artwork with Artboard on; Copy, Cut and Paste take the artboard with its art, Paste right of the last artboard, Paste in Place where it was, into this or another document, #446; Object › Artboards › Rearrange All Artboards lays them out in a grid by row or by column, in one row or one column, left to right or right to left, from the menu, the Artboards panel or Properties' Rearrange All, #681; Scale Artwork with Artboard, in the Control bar and Properties beside Move Artwork with Artboard, resizes the artboard proportionally with the art fully inside it and its guides, strokes and corners per the Scale preferences, #602), Measure, Type, Hand, Zoom, Rotate View.
  • Editing type: double-clicking type with a selection tool switches to the Type tool with the caret where it was clicked.
  • Temporary tools: Cmd with any other tool drags with the selection tool used last (Selection, Direct Selection or Group Selection). Held Space pans and Cmd+Space zooms (Cmd+Alt+Space out) whatever the tool.
  • Panel drag and drop: art dragged off the canvas onto the Symbols panel becomes a symbol, onto the Swatches panel a pattern swatch and onto the Brushes panel an Art brush; a symbol dragged onto the canvas places an instance where it is dropped, and a brush dragged onto a path is applied to it.
  • Tool double-clicks: double-clicking a tool's button opens its options: Hand fits the artboard in the window, Zoom shows 100 %, Rotate, Scale, Reflect and Shear open their Object › Transform dialogs, the Selection, Direct Selection and Group Selection tools the Move dialog (Enter opens these seven tools' dialogs too), Gradient, Eyedropper, Blend and the Liquify tools their panels or options, the Pencil, Paintbrush, Smooth, Blob Brush and Eraser tools their Tool Options (Fidelity, fill, the tolerances, the brush size), and (#812) the Flare tool its Flare Tool Options, the Artboard tool the active artboard's Artboard Options, the graph tools Graph Type for the selected graph, the Symbolism tools the Symbolism Tools Options (Diameter, Intensity, Symbol Set Density) and the Magic Wand tool its panel.
• Layers panel: every layer, sublayer, group and object is a clickable row at any depth: a click highlights it and makes its layer current (new art goes there), Shift-click a range, Ctrl/Cmd-click toggles. Sublayers are no longer treated as objects: clicks, marquees, Select All and the Select menu take the art inside them, and each sublayer selects in its own colour. Selection squares on rows with selected art (click selects a row's art, Shift adds or removes; dragging the square moves the selection to another row, Alt copies), the eye and lock on every row with drag-down-the-column (one undo step), Ctrl/Cmd-click an eye for per-layer Outline, Alt-click an eye or lock to hide or lock the other layers (again: show or unlock them all), triangles with Alt to open or close everything inside, drag and drop rows above, below or into layers and groups with a drop line (Alt copies) and a dimmed copy of the row under the pointer (dropped on the trash rows are deleted, on New Layer duplicated, as in Illustrator), inline rename, Delete key on highlighted rows. Buttons and the full panel menu: New Layer/Sublayer (Alt: options, Ctrl: on top), Duplicate, Delete, Options for Selection, clipping mask, isolation, Locate Object, Merge Selected, Flatten Artwork, Collect in New Layer, Release to Layers (Sequence and Build), Reverse Order, Template, Hide/Outline/Lock Others and Show/Preview/Unlock All, Paste Remembers Layers, Panel Options (row size, thumbnails per kind, Show Layers Only). Layer Options: name, colour (presets, each with a chip of its colour, or custom), Template, Lock, Show, Print, Preview (outline drawing and clicking) and Dim Images to %. Every operation is a command (layer.move, layer.highlight, layer.merge…) with validation against cycles and invalid nesting. A document opens with only its top-level layers open; the rows left open are saved in the native file (nothing is written for the default) and reopen that way. Only the rows scrolled into view are laid out, from a row list made once per change: a layer of 5,000 groups of 10 paths, all open, draws the panel in 0.4 ms a frame instead of about 29 s (#638).
• Drawing aids: Smart Guides and snapping (moving, with the Selection, Group Selection or Direct Selection tool, and resizing by the bounding-box handles with the Selection or Free Transform tool, Shift and Alt too: the dragged corner or side lands on the other objects' anchors and centres ("anchor", "center") or lines up with their edges and centres (a line and "align"); with Smart Guides › Spacing Guides, a moved selection that lines up with nothing along an axis lands as far from its neighbour as two other objects of its row or column are apart, or halfway between its two neighbours, the equal gaps marked; with View › Snap to Grid on, a moved selection lands on the grid instead, by whichever of its edges or its centre is nearest a gridline on each axis, #740; the Rotate, Scale, Shear and Reflect tools drag from the anchor they grab and snap the pointer the same way, so a corner dragged onto another object's anchor scales exactly onto it, #482; anchors dragged with Direct Selection: the one pressed on lands on other anchors, its own path's that stay put among them, on path segments or in line with them, the others following, Shift keeps 45° steps, and with Smart Guides off Snap to Point pulls it onto anchors; the Artboard tool snaps artboards, and their bleed, to other artboards, bleeds and art, the grid or whole pixels while moving, copying and resizing them, and the Transform panel shows and edits the active artboard's X/Y/W/H; drawn points, #506: hovering shows where the press goes, the point lands on the other objects' anchors, centres and paths ("anchor", "center", "path") or lines up with their anchors, edges and centres ("align"), the Pen's on the path being drawn too, near a construction guide through the anchor before it on that guide (Preferences › Smart Guides › Construction Guides and Angles), and with Shift kept to its 45° step or a square's diagonal it slides along that way into line; the targets are gathered once per document state, from the art in the window, and the anchors, centres and lines near the pointer are found by bisection, so hovering never rescans the document), guides dragged out of the rulers (#451: they snap as moved guides do, Shift to the ruler's ticks; with the Artboard tool they are artboard guides, which run across their artboard only and move, copy and delete with it, guide.add {artboard}) that the Selection, Direct Selection and Group Selection tools then pick and drag (#414: the selected guides highlight and move together, Alt copies them, Shift snaps the dragged one to the ticks, otherwise it snaps to pixels, the grid or the edges, centres (so the sides' midpoints) and anchors of the art and the artboards, or with Smart Guides off Snap to Point pulls it onto anchors; the arrow keys nudge them, Delete deletes them, dragging one back onto its ruler deletes it, Lock Guides and Hide Guides leave them alone; guide.list, guide.select, guide.move and guide.remove reach agents), a right-click on either ruler or the origin box to pick the document's units (the current one checked; document.setUnits, one undo step, #528), and Draw Normal / Behind / Inside modes.
• Views: the status bar's artboard navigator (first, previous, next, last; view.goToArtboard) goes to an artboard and fits it, and Fit Artboard in Window and Actual Size show the navigator's artboard. The Artboards panel highlights that active artboard: clicking a row makes it active (the Artboard tool's too, while it is chosen) as does clicking an artboard with the Artboard tool, double-clicking its number also fits it in the window and double-clicking its name renames it. Duplicate Artboards, or a row dragged onto New Artboard, copies the artboard with its art (#446). Escape leaves Presentation Mode, F from it goes back to Normal Screen Mode, and the screen mode isn't saved with the preferences: the app always starts in Normal Screen Mode with its menus and panels (#472). View › Pixel Preview shows the art as the document pixels it rasterizes to, one per point and hard-edged when magnified, turning with a rotated view (it used to draw the smooth vectors, with only the pixel grid over them).
• Geometry and effects:
  • Pathfinder (10 exact curve booleans), Offset, Outline Stroke, Simplify, Clean Up, Split Into Grid, Divide Objects Below. Object › Path › Remove Anchor Points (path.removeAnchors) removes the direct-selected anchors without opening their paths (the Delete key still deletes them with their segments): the neighbours keep their handle directions and their facing handles are refitted so one cubic follows the two old segments, and straight sides stay straight. The Delete Anchor Point tool uses the same refit. The Control bar, the contextual task bar, the Properties quick actions and the canvas context menu offer it when anchors are selected. With anchors selected, the Control bar and the Properties panel also convert them to corner or smooth (path.convertAnchors), connect end points (Join) and cut the path at them (path.cutAtAnchors, also on the task bar and the context menu): a closed path opens there and an open one becomes one path per piece, each cut leaving one of its two coincident anchors selected so a drag pulls the path apart.
  • Live effects with previewing dialogs: Distort & Transform, Path, Convert to Shape, 15 Warp styles, Round Corners, Scribble, Effect → Pathfinder (all 10 operations, live on groups; several loose objects are grouped first, in one undo step), Color Adjustments (Brightness/Contrast, Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, Shift to Color, Temperature/Tint, on vectors, live type and embedded images), and raster drop shadow, glows and feather. SVG and PDF export keep live effects (geometry baked; SVG raster effects as filters).
• Type: Text Wrap, Type on a Path effects (Rainbow/Skew/3D Ribbon/Stair Step/Gravity) and Options (Flip, Align to Path, Spacing; OK keeps the type where it is), type on a path's start, centre and end brackets (Selection and Direct Selection drag them to set where the type runs, slide it along its path and, across the path, flip it: #429), Character and Paragraph Styles (override-preserving redefine), paragraph attributes per paragraph (alignment, indents, spacing, hyphenation, hanging punctuation, tab stops, paragraph style, direction, mojikumi and leading model; the Paragraph, Tabs and Paragraph Styles panels act on the paragraphs the Type tool's selection or caret touches, Return continues the paragraph's style, threads and SVG keep them), Area Type Options (rows/columns/inset/first baseline, vertical Align Top/Center/Bottom/Justify per row/column, reflowing non-rectangular frames and text wrap), threaded text across any closed shapes, Fit Headline, the Every-line Composer for justified and ragged text (paragraph-wide breaks for an even rag, Single-line per object from the Paragraph panel menu or text.setFormat {composer}). Area type resizes like Illustrator's type areas: a bounding-box handle drag (Selection tool) or Area Type Options Width/Height size the frame and the text reflows at its size (threads too); Direct Selection drags a frame corner or edge (text.reshapeArea). Point type still scales. Auto Size: the frame height follows the text after every edit, in the same undo step (rectangular frames of horizontal type in one row; columns get the least height that holds them; a height set by hand or threading turns it off), and the "Auto Size New Area Type" preference gives it to new area type. Shrink Text to Fit (beyond Illustrator): overflowing area type scales its sizes, leading and baseline shifts down by the largest factor (in 0.1 pt steps of the first run, down to a minimum percentage) that fits, at layout time so every export sees it. text.areaOptions and document.inspect report overflow and the shrink factor. The Selection tool shows the type widget beside selected type's bounding box (hollow on point type, filled on area type); double-clicking it converts between them (Type › Convert To Area Type / Convert To Point Type), keeping the text and its styles in place. Variable fonts list every named instance as a style of their family (Figtree Light to Black and their italics, Bahnschrift, Segoe UI Variable), and the instance chosen is shaped, drawn, outlined and measured at its axis settings; PDF and SVG embed it as that instance. Variation axis sliders are not done. Beyond Illustrator: inline graphics (text.insertInline, Type ▸ Insert Inline Symbol) set a document symbol in a run of type as one character that flows, wraps and justifies like a glyph (InDesign-style inline objects, e.g. mana symbols in card rules text): sized to a multiple of the font size, centred on the cap height, opening up tall lines, following Redefine Symbol; a character of its run's size for Character Alignment and Top-to-Top leading, placed by the bidi reordering in right-to-left text (a neutral U+FFFC); drawn on the canvas, kept as live text plus a <use> in SVG and as vector art in PDF; Backspace removes it whole. Hebrew and Arabic are laid out right to left with the Unicode bidirectional algorithm (embedded Latin and numbers keep their direction, lines put in visual order after wrapping) in point, area and path type, with caret, selection and arrow keys in visual order; each paragraph's direction comes from its first strong character unless Paragraph Direction sets it (Paragraph panel with Show Indic Options, text.setFormat {direction}), and new type aligns to the start of its direction. SVG export outlines right-to-left text. Arabic typefaces: builds made with a craft-fonts checkout that holds its Arabic families (Noto Sans Arabic, the Arabic fallback, plus Cairo, Tajawal, Almarai, IBM Plex Sans Arabic, Noto Kufi Arabic, Amiri, Alexandria, Fustat, Reem Kufi, Aref Ruqaa and Gulzar once craft-fonts adds them, storytold/craft-fonts#11; releases get them when their craft-fonts pin moves) list them in the font menus on desktop; the web build fetches them from beside the wasm (Noto Sans Arabic before start, so Arabic never shows as boxes, the rest in the background). Font Size and Leading are combo boxes in the Character and Properties panels (Font Size in the Control bar too, beside the Character link, font family and style): type, step with ↑/↓ or the spinner, scrub the label, or pick a preset (6–72 pt, shown in the type unit; Leading also Auto), each pick one undo step; Kerning and Tracking list -100…200; a size, leading, kerning or tracking the selected text doesn't share shows blank (#458). Type › Bold and Italic (beyond Illustrator, as page layout apps have them; Cmd+Shift+B / Cmd+Shift+I while the Type tool edits text) switch the selected type to its family's own Bold or Italic face and back, keeping its width (a Narrow face stays Narrow); a family without that face says so (#724).
• Interface languages, vertical type: VectorCraft ▸ Language (or Preferences ▸ User Interface) picks Automatic (the system locale) or a registered language, persisted as interfaceLanguage. Translations come from per-language catalogs (i18n/*.tsv): Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Spanish (neutral international Spanish, for every es-* locale), French (every fr-* locale), Italian (every it-* locale) Russian (every ru-* locale) and Ukrainian (every uk-* locale) cover the whole interface, Czech and Brazilian Portuguese every menu label, Brazilian Portuguese the shell's tl! literals too (tested); Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Ukrainian also translate status-bar and error messages as they are shown (@msg templates, every message literal tested; the messages themselves stay English for agents); untranslated text stays English. Japanese and Chinese glyphs come from the craft-fonts build input (release builds) or the installed fonts, Czech, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian and Ukrainian ones from the bundled UI fonts. The web app follows the browser's languages (or ?lang=). The Basic toolbar's Type button holds Vertical Type in its flyout. Vertical Type, Vertical Area Type and Vertical Type on a Path create vertical text (columns right to left, upright CJK glyphs and marks with vert alternates, Latin and longer numbers on their side, two- and three-digit numbers set as tate-chu-yoko in one em of the column (kept whole when justified), upright glyphs centred on the column (tracked or justified too), point type's anchor on the first column's centre line); kinsoku applies to horizontal and vertical Japanese (Paragraph panel › Kinsoku Set, text.setFormat {kinsoku}: Hard, the default, keeps closing marks, iteration marks, the prolonged sound mark and small kana off the line start and opening brackets off its end; Soft lets 々, ー and small kana start a line as JLREQ's level 3 rules do; None turns it off), and justified Japanese lines spread their room between characters (not inside Latin words); Paragraph panel › Mojikumi Set (shown with Preferences › Type › Show East Asian Options, text.setFormat {mojikumi}): None or Line-end Punctuation Half Width (new type's default, as in Illustrator; older documents and imported text keep None) shares one half-em space between consecutive punctuation, sets a closing mark ending a line half width and an opening bracket starting a line flush with its start (a paragraph's first line at its first-line indent, JIS X 4051's principle in JLREQ 3.1.5), and puts a quarter em between Japanese and Latin letters or digits; Paragraph panel menu › Top-to-Top / Bottom-to-Bottom Leading measures leading from em box top to top (area type's first line touches the frame) or from baseline to baseline (new type in a Japanese interface starts top to top, with em box centre character alignment, #432); Paragraph panel menu › Burasagari None / Regular / Force (text.setFormat {burasagari: "none"|"standard"|"forced"}) hangs an East Asian comma or full stop (、。，．､｡) ending an area type line outside it, Regular (new type's default) when it doesn't fit and Force always (the rest of the line then fills the measure; closing brackets and Latin punctuation don't hang); Character panel menu › Character Alignment (with the East Asian options; text.setFormat or text.setRangeStyle {charAlign}) lines characters smaller than the largest on their line up on the Roman baseline, the em box top/right, centre or bottom/left, or the ICF (ideographic character face) top/right or bottom/left, from the font's BASE table or, without one, the average ink box of some ideographs and kana; Type ▸ Type Orientation switches existing text; caret, selection, hit testing and arrow keys follow the writing direction. Vertical text exports to PDF as real text and to SVG as outlines.
• Transparency: opacity masks (clip/invert/disable/link), exported as SVG <mask> and PDF soft masks.
• Image Trace Flat Logo mode: a fourth mode beside Black and White, Grayscale and Color, for flat-colour logos. Each pixel is read as a blend of the logo's colours (found automatically or named), the blend is interpolated smoothly and every outline is placed where two colours are equally present, so edges are accurate to a fraction of a pixel. Outlines are then cleaned: corners the blur rounded are put back, near-straight runs and near-circular arcs become exact lines and arcs, the rest is fitted with as few Béziers as the tolerance allows, touching colours overlap by a hair so no gap opens, and an outline that strays from the raw contour is fitted plainly instead. Gradients and photos are refused with advice to use Color. Measured (a local experiment, not run in CI): a flat-colour logo's vector original was rendered down to a soft 199 × 100 px transparent PNG, traced, and the result compared with the original at 1600 px wide. The built-in colour presets (6 Colors, 16 Colors, High Fidelity Photo, Low Fidelity Photo) had a mean edge error of 2.5 to 3.4 px and region overlap of 0.88 to 0.91; Flat Logo had 0.78 px and 0.966 (0.48 px and 0.975 from a crisp source), in about 0.1 s. Limits: flat-colour art only; needle-thin sharp tips are shortened by about 1.7 source pixels because the blur erases them; it works at no more than 1024 px on the long side (larger images are averaged down first); only one logo family has been scored against a vector original.
• Advanced art: live Blends (steps/distance/smooth colour, editable spine, anchor-targeted Blend tool, faithful interpolation, knockout), Envelope Distort (warp/mesh/top object, Reset, full Envelope Options, mesh handles, Edit Contents; type, images, symbols, gradients, patterns and appearance distorted everywhere), Liquify tools with options and pen pressure, Puppet Warp with rotating pins, Perspective Grid with presets, movable planes and projected type (choosing a perspective tool shows the grid; Hide Grid hides it with the tool still chosen), Gradient Mesh, Shape Builder (stroke-only open paths and lines cut the regions they cross and enclose regions of their own; filled open paths count as closed; erase mode while Alt/Option is held: a minus pointer, red highlights of what will go, a click or drag deletes the regions touched, the pieces of open lines and the edges (outline pieces between the points where paths meet, opening their paths there) it passes over, one undo step, shapeBuilder.merge {erase} and shapeBuilder.regions edges over MCP), Live Paint (every path an edge, open lines included), Image Trace (12 presets, colour layers traced in parallel; a trace past two million anchor points or an image over 64 megapixels is refused with advice rather than running out of memory, and a selection too large to outline shows its bounds (#525); Object › Image Trace › Make and Make and Expand trace at once with the Default preset, #543; with an image selected the Control bar and the Properties panel show Image Trace, whose arrow traces with any preset, Mask (object.maskImage: a clipping path on the image's outline, selected so its handles crop), Crop Image (a crop box on the image, starting on its part over the artboard, dragged by its handles or inside it, the outside dimmed, with X/Y/W/H, Apply and Cancel in the Control bar, Enter and Escape, #734; object.cropImage {rect} for agents, {trim: true} cuts an image to its pixels that aren't fully transparent, pixel for pixel) and Embed or Unembed in place of Fill and Stroke; with an Image Trace object selected, its Preset (choosing another traces again), View, the Image Trace panel and Expand, plus Release in Properties; the five View modes (Tracing Result, with Outlines, Outlines, Outlines with Source Image, Source Image) redraw a trace on screen without tracing again, are saved with it and imageTrace.setView sets them, while exports and Expand keep the result; the panel's Advanced section is a header that stays open or closed as it was left (part of #641); Color mode's Palette: Limited, Full Tone (as many colours as the tones need, Less … More), Automatic (flat art with its own colours, else Full Tone; a heuristic) and Document Library (the most used colours of the document's swatches or a swatch library, filled with the swatch colours as they are), part of #641; Advanced › Create: Fills and/or Strokes, where lines up to the Stroke width trace as stroked centre lines (distance transform, thinning, a skeleton graph with spurs pruned, curve fitting; one width per line; without Fills, wider areas become stroked outlines), part of #641), pattern swatches with pattern editing mode, live Repeat (radial/grid/mirror).
• Paint and appearance (M3):
  • Swatches: names follow the colour model and are unique; Swatch Options (process/spot, Global, Gray/RGB/HSB/CMYK/Web, live preview); editing a global or spot swatch recolours every linked fill, stroke and text run in one undo step; multi-select and delete with confirmation; New Swatch and New Color Group dialogs (a group from the selected artwork's colours); swatches in colour groups convert, separate and count like any other. The Swatches panel selects ranges and whole groups, has a find field, and drags swatches to reorder, regroup or paint art; Add Used Colors, Select All Unused, Merge, Ungroup and Sort by Kind; a CMYK document keeps applied colours in CMYK. Swatch libraries: nine generated colour libraries and five gradient libraries in a library panel, saved as .vcswatches, .gpl, swatch exchange (.ase) or CSS, and loaded from .vcswatches, .gpl and .ase files (.ase both ways: RGB, CMYK, Lab and Gray; global, spot and process; groups) and from color books (.acb, read only: the RGB, CMYK or Lab colors of a book such as a Pantone book a user owns, named with its prefix and suffix, spot unless it says process, #831); swatch.library.copyToUser copies a loaded library into the User Defined folder without replacing a file, and a file with the same extension and bytes as a User Defined library opens as that library. Tints of global and spot colours ("Name 40%") stay linked and separate as a percentage of their plate. Spot colours can be defined in Lab (Spot Colors options). A built-in [Registration] swatch prints on every plate.
  • Colour: a Color Picker (colour field, H/S/B/R/G/B channel slider, HSB/RGB/Lab/CMYK fields, hex, web-only snapping, out-of-gamut correction); the Color panel follows each colour's own model and Alt-click paints the other proxy; proxies look through groups and show "?" for mixed paint; Invert, Complement, Apply Last Color (,) and Apply Last Gradient (.) keep the colour model; every paint command feeds the recent colours. The Color Guide has 21 harmony rules, Steps and Variation options and Limit to Library. Adjust Color Balance (its Global mode shifts tints) and Saturate preview live; Edit Colors and Recolor also reach meshes, images and patterns. Recolor Artwork has colour reduction, five recolour methods, presets, Limit to Library, a colour-wheel Edit tab and Edit Color Group; a local Color Themes panel saves five-colour themes. Fill/Stroke chips open swatch and mixer popovers (the Properties panel has the Control bar's Fill and Stroke chips, Stroke link and weight spinner, with nothing selected too), panels have Illustrator's Window menu keys (Align Shift+F7, Transform Shift+F8, Pathfinder Cmd+Shift+F9, Layers F7, Character Cmd+T…; every panel can be given one in Edit › Keyboard Shortcuts), and Eyedropper Options pick up and apply chosen attributes (Alt and Shift+Alt, image pixels). An ICC CMYK profile converts straight into the RGB working space (not through sRGB, so a wider space such as Wide Gamut RGB keeps colours sRGB can't hold) with the colour settings' black-point compensation, on the canvas and in RGB exports alike. Fills and strokes can overprint (Attributes panel, Overprint Black options), and CMYK documents blend in inks on screen, in PDF and when flattening. Document Color Mode converts the art, symbols, pattern tiles and swatches through the colour settings: Gray stays Gray, RGB greys separate into four-colour greys and a rich black as Illustrator does, or go on the black plate only with grays: "black" (also for document.open {colorMode}).
  • Gradients: lossless, validated gradient params; gradients follow rotate, reflect, shear, non-uniform scale and distortions; the Gradient tool edits the fill or stroke of the active proxy, type included; an interactive on-canvas annotator (move, length/angle, rotate, add/move/delete/duplicate stops, midpoints, a stop popover, Delete and arrow keys). The Gradient panel has the Fill/Stroke proxy, a gradient-swatch dropdown with Save to Swatches, midpoint locations, Alt-drag to copy or swap stops, swatch drops on the ramp and a stop eyedropper; copied appearances and graphic styles place gradients on each target's own bounds; gradient handles snap and honour Constrain Angle. Gradient stops stay linked to global and spot swatches. Freeform gradients (points and lines) are edited on the canvas; radial gradients have an extent ellipse, an aspect handle and an off-centre focal point (SVG fx/fy, PDF two-point radials). A stroke's gradient runs within, along or across it. Object ▸ Expand turns gradients into N objects or a gradient mesh.
  • Strokes: one stroke-geometry module shared by the canvas, SVG, PDF and Outline Stroke; dotted lines (zero-length dashes draw dots or squares); arrowheads with hollow outlines, tip-on-end or extend-past-end alignment and one opacity for line and head. SVG and PDF export arrowheads, width profiles, brushes and aligned strokes exactly as the canvas draws them; Outline Stroke and the live Outline Stroke effect outline every stroke item as drawn (dashes, heads, profiles, alignment); dashes can be fitted to corners and path ends; width profiles carry through dashes, and their corners take the join. The Stroke panel edits type's character strokes, follows the stroke units (its weight presets are round values in that unit: 0.25 mm, 0.0625 in, 1 px, #426; fields show four decimals in mm, cm and inches, three in points), shows mixed values blank and opens from the Control bar. A width profile library, thirty more arrowheads, and Width Point Edit with multi-select and discontinuous points. Visual bounds and clicks cover the whole painted stroke. Scale Strokes & Effects, Scale Corners and Use Preview Bounds work everywhere, and new art inherits stroke options, a graphic style or the whole last appearance.
  • Brushes (part of #852): double-clicking a brush in the Brushes panel (or the panel menu's Brush Options…) opens Calligraphic Brush Options (Name; Angle, Roundness and Size, each Fixed, Random or Pressure with its Variation; live previews of the nib and of a light–heavy–light stroke) or Bristle Brush Options (Shape and the bristle sliders); OK edits the brush and every stroke painted with it. The Paintbrush records the pen pressure along each stroke (kept with the path, saved, and joined when a stroke continues a path); a Calligraphic value on Pressure goes from value − variation at the lightest pressure to value + variation at the heaviest, on the canvas and in SVG, PDF and the other exports. Brushes saved before keep their look. Still to come: Scatter, Art and Pattern Brush Options, Stylus Wheel, Tilt, Bearing and Rotation, and pen pressure on macOS.
  • Appearance: the Appearance panel's selected row drives every paint, stroke, gradient and transparency edit (item on the commands); effects apply to one fill or stroke; per-item Opacity popups, whose blend-mode list and opacity slider stay open inside them (#430; the Control bar's Stroke popover too); Mixed Appearances, Layers target dots and basic-appearance rules. Effects can be reordered, moved between items and copied by dragging; Show All Hidden Attributes; clicking an effect edits it in place; the object thumbnail drags onto art; effects render on type, images, symbols, blends, envelopes, meshes and repeats, and per-item raster effects export. Groups, layers and type have their own fills, strokes and effects (Contents and Characters rows); the Layers panel's target circles target layers, groups and objects; Expand Appearance turns fills, strokes, effects and brushes into objects.
  • Masks and clipping: opacity-mask controls work while the mask is being edited; transparency commands take ids and work without a selection; clipping sets clip by compound paths, even-odd paths, text and groups on screen and in raster export, matching SVG/PDF. Alt-click shows only the mask; SVG masks keep Clip and Invert; the transparency grid is per-document state; a clipping path's own fill and stroke paint behind and over the clipped art; layers can be clipping masks.
  • Transparency: three-state Knockout Group (on, neutral, off), Opacity & Mask Define Knockout Shape, Page Isolated Blending and Page Knockout Group, on screen and in SVG/PDF. Blend modes match the standard formulas on screen, in SVG and in PDF, and non-isolated groups blend with the art below. Flatten Transparency with presets, a dialog and a Flattener Preview panel.
  • Graphic styles: styles keep opacity and blend mode, capture groups and type, apply on top with Alt, and link to the objects using them; Redefine, Break Link, Graphic Style Options, Select All Unused, Sort by Name, and Select > Same Graphic Style / Appearance Attribute. The panel has list and thumbnail views with rendered previews, merge, reorder and drag and drop, plus a Control bar Style picker; six generated style libraries save and load as .vcstyles.
  • Neutral wording: labels, MCP tool text, docs and packaging use neutral names, and cargo xtask brands (part of cargo xtask ci) fails on vendor names.
• Colour, type and file workflows: Recolor Artwork (dialog with harmonies), Edit Colors, Find & Replace, Change Case, Smart Punctuation, Guides, Lock/Hide Above, Transform Each, Rasterize.
• Fonts: a font is found by any of its names (family and style in every language of its name table, legacy family/style pairs, PostScript name), so documents from other apps open with the font they name; Find Font and text.fonts say for each font whether it was found exactly, by another name, substituted or missing, and how many glyphs are missing. PDF and .ai import brings Japanese text back as live type: CID fonts without a ToUnicode map read through the standard CMaps, vertical columns (WMode 1) as vertical type, letter spacing as tracking; a glyph is live type only when the installed font (in the closest style of its family) draws the same glyph, and text in a font that isn't installed comes in as live type shown in the fallback font until the font is installed (exports that draw it — PDF, EPS, EMF/WMF, raster, SVG outlines or embedded fonts — warn that they wrote the fallback font; textAs: outlines keeps the PDF's embedded glyphs). Two installed versions of one family and style (a font library keeping an old file beside a new one) both load, the first staying the one the family and style resolve to; PDF and .ai import tries each version when the glyphs differ, and type set in a version other than that one names it (CharStyle::font_version), which layout, the substituted-glyph highlight, Find Font, Package and Document Info follow. Fonts outside the font folders are listed too: those font services such as Adobe Fonts load on Windows, through DirectWrite, and those apps and font managers register with CoreText on macOS (#579). When a document opens with fonts that aren't available, fonts used only in symbols included, a Missing Fonts dialog lists them after the linked-file questions, with Find Fonts (Type › Find Font on them) and Close. Its Find in Folder… (in Find Font too) searches a folder on several threads, reads only what the font scan reads of font files and skips app packages, the Program Files and ProgramData folders, the system's folders and the app data folders in a home folder; Add Fonts copies the font files the user chooses, suitcase fonts with their resource fork, into VectorCraft's own Fonts folder, which the desktop app and vectorcraft-cli read (text.missingFonts, text.findFontFiles, text.addFontFiles).
• Files (M4):
  • .vectorcraft (lossless JSON, compressed, atomic saves, save down to v1), Save As with a format chooser, Save a Copy, Revert, templates, Data Recovery after a crash (browser tabs hold their copies with Web Locks too, so a background tab's copies are never taken for a crash's, and a tab repairs copies another removed when it resumes: #367), background save and export. The desktop app writes its warnings and errors (graphics adapter, a lost graphics device, panics the guard recovered from) to standard error and to logs/vectorcraft.log next to the preferences, the two previous runs kept and each file capped at 16 MiB, so a launch without a terminal still leaves something to attach to a bug report (#465).
  • SVG/SVGZ in and out with SVG Options, Preserve Editing, symbols, filters, rich text and physical units (SVG type under a transform or viewBox scale opens at the size it draws at, the scale moved into its size, leading, baseline shift and strokes, a stretch, skew or rotation kept as its transform: #396; a top-level group with a clip path, such as a clipped Inkscape layer, opens as a layer with a clipping mask, its name kept: #420; hidden objects written hidden on Save and convert, and data-* attributes kept as the objects' own data: #522; top-level groups open as layers named from data-name, else the id, also when one more group (a transform on all the art, a <switch>) wraps them, hidden ones hidden, and a file whose art sits loose under a root <svg> with an id (or data-name), as one-layer exports write it, opens with its one layer named from it; nested groups stay groups, except the sublayers VectorCraft writes, marked data-vc-layer, and Inkscape sublayers, which open as sublayers in their layer's colour: #372); PDF and PDF-compatible .ai in and out (layers, with hidden ones kept hidden with their art and nested ones as sublayers, on pages of up to 64 million operators, art whose layer can't be told going to a hidden, non-printing layer rather than showing or printing: #419; strokes kept live, a fill and a stroke of one outline as one object; a type object's stroke written as each glyph's outline stroked back on the type, so it stays one editable object; lines wrapped in a frame (each wrapped line ending in a space, one left edge, leading and font) back as one area type object, left aligned or justified with its paragraph spacing, where laying it out breaks the lines where the file does; glyphs set apart by gaps wider than a space (a barcode's digit groups) keeping their places; layers stacked as the pages mark them even when one first paints on a later page, art ending a layer's marked content or a clip closing in a later layer kept in its own layer, and layers with no art kept empty: #508; art reaching past a plain PDF's page clipped to its crop box, as PDF viewers show it, each such object in a clip group of its own (a PDF-compatible .ai opens whole: #675); masks, editable text with type set along a curve coming back as type on a path, each artboard's art on its own page only, an .ai's white page under its layers left out rather than coming in as art, spot colours, presets, security, marks and bleed, ICC output intents, raster effects, subset fonts, PDF/X, PDF layers, overprint, page thumbnails, fast web view, PDF 1.3). CMYK images keep their ink amounts from PDF import (and from placed CMYK TIFFs) to PDF export: a CMYK JPEG passes through unchanged, others stay CMYK (DeviceCMYK, or ICC-based CMYK in PDF/X-3/X-4) unless the Output settings convert them; the canvas shows them through the working CMYK profile (#320). A masked CMYK image (/SMask, /Mask or a colour key) keeps its inks too, its alpha coming in as a greyscale opacity mask.
  • EPS and DXF in and out, EMF/WMF in and out; PNG (with PNG-8), JPEG, WebP, GIF, TIFF, BMP, Targa and layered PSD export; PSD and PSB files open and place, linked or embedded, as their merged image in every colour mode and depth (#918). EPS import runs a PostScript Level 3 interpreter written from the PostScript Language Reference: resource categories and resourceforall, local and global VM (currentglobal/setglobal/gcheck), clipsave/cliprestore, subarrays and substrings that share storage, the standard dictionaries in systemdict, dictstack, internaldict, executable filters and strings, load by any key, //name immediate names, token, execform, user paths, cshow, rootfont, cachestatus, colour rendering and halftone queries, file status and data read with flushfile, and pdfmark marks dropped (Discord feedback, #466, #469, #474). Masked images (ImageType 3 in its three interleavings) and reusable streams are read, and an image's several data sources are read in turn, as the reference defines (procedures that read one file get their own rows: such images came in banded, #498). restore puts dictionaries back as they were at the save, so programs that count their saves in a dictionary read to their end (part of #505). Tiling patterns come in as pattern swatches, uncoloured ones too; Type 3 fonts' glyphs as their outlines, spaced by ashow/widthshow/xshow/kshow; mesh and function-based shadings (types 1, 4–7) as gradient meshes; sampled functions (type 0) and Flate/LZW predictors are read. It is tested with programs written from the specification in the ways common generators use these features; Inkscape/cairo EPS files open as vectors. When a file's PostScript still can't be read, it opens as its TIFF preview, its Windows metafile preview (as vectors) or its EPSI preview, and the warning (in the status bar, document.open/app.open/MCP open_file replies and vectorcraft-cli info) names the error, the operator that raised it and the procedures it ran in. Legacy PostScript .ai files (Illustrator 3–8, written with the prolog that defines their operators) keep their groups and nested groups (u … U), between and inside clipping groups; EPS and EMF/WMF import nest clips (and groups) at most 128 deep, so a hostile file can't exhaust the stack. DXF TEXT justified Fit or Aligned spans its two points (stretched, or scaled as a whole). PDF export writes type as real, searchable text in embedded subset fonts by default, as Illustrator's PDF presets do (Convert Text to Outlines is an option; printer's marks stay shapes), so text-heavy PDFs stay small (#733). DXF export writes each fill as its outlines followed by its hatch, so laser and cutter software, which skips hatches, gets filled art and type too (#546).
  • Affinity documents in (AF.1–AF.4): .af (Affinity 3) and .afdesign/.afphoto/.afpub (Affinity 1 and 2, container versions 8–12) open and place as editable art: layers and sublayers, groups (pass-through or isolated), artboards (with their names and backgrounds) and Publisher pages side by side, curves with live corners, parametric shapes (rectangles with corner radii, ellipses, polygons, stars, pies, triangles, trapezoids), compound shapes, solid/linear/elliptical gradient fills and strokes (weight, dashes, alignment, scale-with-object), clipping by nesting, vector and pixel masks, artistic and frame text with fonts, sizes, tracking, leading and alignment, placed images (their original JPEG/PNG) and pixel layers (8/16-bit RGB, CMYK), opacity, visibility, locking and blend modes, at the document's resolution in points. Effects, adjustments, brushes and pressure profiles, transparency gradients, master pages, symbol instances (imported as their cached picture), special shapes (cloud, heart, cog…, imported as ellipses) and Affinity-only blend modes are named in the import warning. A file whose native data can't be read opens as its embedded preview with the reason, and that preview can't be placed. Save never writes back over the Affinity file and there is no Affinity export. AF.4 adds Affinity 3 artboard recognition and actual-outline clipping, source-backed JPEG/PNG raster tiles, Unicode text-run recovery, stored fallback/exact installed fonts, OpenType feature flags and compound-geometry limits. 51 public CC0/MIT/Apache-2.0 files (33 current .af), pinned and sha256-verified (cargo xtask corpus --affinity), test native retention and every-board native/SVG/PDF/PSD output for current files; selected files compare their saved thumbnails. No Affinity reopen or independent paired PSD oracle was available; source audit and complex-font gaps; scope, provenance and limits.
  • Placed documents: File › Place of a .vectorcraft file links to it by default (file.place's link): one locked object showing an artboard of the document (or its art's bounds), read the way placing it without Link reads it, its symbols, patterns and images kept apart from the document's; without Link (or from bytes, not a file) it is an editable copy as before. It stays vectors in every output (SVG, PDF, EPS, EMF, DXF), and so do placed documents inside it, read from their own files up to 8 levels deep (documents that place each other stop there). On screen they draw from bitmaps cached per file and zoom step, shared by every copy and made in the background (a placeholder until ready), so a sheet of them redraws in about a millisecond; exports and prints draw them exactly. Like linked images, a save keeps only a preview of each (JPEG when opaque) unless Include Linked Files; output, and zooming past the preview, read the file again, falling back to the preview with a warning when it is gone or changed. Saves for older versions write them as plain art. Links check, update, relink, Update Links on open, Link Info (the artboard's size), Placement Options, Break Link (also Embed, Object › Expand: the editable copy placing without Link gives, its resources joining the document), Edit Original (the document in a new tab) and the Links panel cover them; saving a document updates the open documents that place it. The native format (v4) keeps data of 8 KB or more after the JSON instead of base64 in it.
  • Place and the Links panel, Package (placed .vectorcraft documents packaged with their own linked files and fonts, relinked to the copies: #777), File Info, Print with print presets, PostScript output and print tiling, slices and Save for Web, Export for Screens and Asset Export, CSS Properties, PNG/PDF/SVG/text clipboard flavours; files copied in a file manager paste as art (SVG, PDF, EMF/WMF, bitmaps) on every desktop platform, and Linux/Wayland reads the compositor's clipboard (#398); on Linux the Paste menu checks the clipboard off the UI thread, so an X11 owner that never answers can't freeze the window (#510); screenshots and other copied pictures paste as embedded images at the view centre everywhere, the web included (#457).
• Performance: 20k shapes + 1k texts render in 27 ms per full-retina frame (7.8 ms zoomed), 7× faster than the first version. The UI thread never blocks. The web build is 7.1 MB gzipped.
• Graphics processor: the canvas is rasterized on the CPU and the GPU only composites it, so any GPU that can show the window will do. Preferences › Performance › Graphics Processor (gpuPreference) is Automatic by default: the power-saving GPU on Windows and macOS (the integrated one on hybrid-graphics laptops, where presenting from the discrete GPU made the window flicker, #306), and the GPU the desktop runs on under Linux, where KWin on an NVIDIA GPU refused frames from a Ryzen's integrated GPU and 0.5.0 crashed at startup (#502). Power Saving and High Performance pick a kind of GPU; WGPU_POWER_PREF, WGPU_ADAPTER_NAME and WGPU_BACKEND override them. The app picks among the adapters that can present to the window (native backends before OpenGL, hardware before software, and on Windows a GPU's DX12 adapter before its Vulkan one: Intel's Vulkan driver made the whole window flicker black, #545), and if the window fails on one while starting up it starts again without it instead of crashing; Help › About, ui.inspect and the log name the adapter in use. When the browser drops the page's WebGPU device or WebGL context, the web build writes recovery copies, starts again on new graphics with the same app and uploads its textures again; if it can't, it removes the stale canvas and says to reload, which offers the copies back. The desktop app writes the copies and says to restart (#369). On Windows and Linux the tools' cursors are OS cursors (bitmaps rasterized once per display scale), which the system moves itself: painted into the window, they trailed the pointer by the frames waiting to be shown, and the window now queues one frame instead of two (#444). macOS and the web still paint them (macOS sizes cursor bitmaps in points, eframe has no bitmap cursors on the web). Pens and touch drive the tools as the mouse does, and a tap pressed and lifted within one frame clicks where it tapped (#491); pen pressure reaches the Liquify tools' Use Pressure Pen on Windows, while winit 0.30 reports none on macOS or Linux and egui none on the web. On Linux, see docs/development.md for pens under Wayland.
• Tests and robustness: ~2,840 automated tests: model-based property tests, a junk-parameter sweep over every command, import fuzzing (SVG, PDF, libraries), golden renders, and MCP end-to-end tests over stdio. Shipped code never panics (workspace lints and a rollback safety net; see docs/development.md).

Milestones and estimates

#	Milestone	Status	Est. remaining, one agent (h)
M0	Skeleton + vertical slice	✅ done	—
M1	Selection, transform, layers, MCP (common command tools, strict keys, session resources and version-aware result hints)	✅ mostly done (transform reference point snaps to anchors/centres; rotated objects keep a rotated bounding box and their angle; Free Transform, Scale and Reflect along a rotated box pending)	4–6
M2	Drawing tools + smart guides	✅ mostly done (Flare, Reshape, Live Corners widget dragging and per-corner radii and kinds landed, on any path's corners; Shaper rough-shape recognition and orientation steps, the remaining Pen modifier nuances; Shaper Groups with editable sources and separate fill/stroke edits landed; construction widget/refinements pending)	12–18
M3	Paint & appearance (swatches, color, gradient, stroke, appearance, transparency, styles)	✅ done (M3.7–M3.98): swatches, groups, libraries, tints, Lab spots and Registration; Color Picker, Color panel, Color Guide, Color Themes, Edit Colors and Recolor Artwork; gradients that follow every transform, the annotator, linked stops, freeform gradients, focal points, gradients on strokes and Expand; stroke geometry, arrowheads, dashes fitted to corners, stroke on type, width profiles and the Width tool, Scale Strokes and preview bounds; Appearance targeting, container appearance, target circles, Expand Appearance; knockout, isolation, blend accuracy, CMYK blending, overprint, Attributes, masks and clipping, Flatten Transparency; graphic styles, links and libraries. Left: freeform and mixed spot/process gradients export as stops or process colours to SVG/PDF; confirm the Scale Strokes & Effects default	4–8
M4	Files (native, SVG, PDF, raster, Export for Screens, clipboard interop)	✅ done (M4.14–M4.98 on 2026-10-05): Save As/Save a Copy/Revert/templates, Data Recovery and background save, SVG import and export fidelity (units, text, symbols, filters, SVGZ, Preserve Editing, SVG Options), PDF import (colours, layers, masks, editable text, security) and export (presets, marks, bleed, ICC and output intent, raster effects, subset fonts, PDF/X-1a, X-3 and X-4, PDF layers, overprint, page thumbnails, fast web view, PDF 1.3), Place and Links, Package, EPS and DXF in and out, EMF/WMF, TIFF/BMP/Targa/PSD/GIF/PNG-8 export, Print and print presets, slices, Save for Web, Asset Export, clipboard flavours, File Info; AF.1–AF.4 add Affinity import (native layers, artboards, vectors, text and images from Affinity 1–3 files; the embedded preview only as a warned fallback; AF.4 expands current .af fixtures and every-board round-trip validation). Left: DWG (use DXF), PSD placement as layers, overprint read back from PDF, Affinity export, polish	3–6 (existing scope; Affinity export unestimated)
M5	Performance	🟡 background render + caches + MT done; vectorcraft-cli bench and vectorcraft-cli perf (budget suite); file format v2 opens 3× faster (50k paths: 722 → 244 ms); raster effects (glows, shadows, blur, feather) no longer force the whole frame single-threaded (filtered offscreen per effect, verified equal to the single-threaded reference); effect-heavy demos need a clean-machine benchmark; dirty-region rendering, GPU backend spike pending	15–25
M6	Path operations (Pathfinder, Shape Builder, offset…)	✅ mostly done (Boolean precision on almost-horizontal edges fixed and the property tests made deterministic; Shape Builder gap detection, large-offset bug open)	3–6
M7	Type (point/area/path, editing, styles, OpenType, threading, glyphs)	🟡 Character/Paragraph Styles, per-paragraph paragraph attributes, Area Type Options (with Width/Height, Auto Size and Shrink Text to Fit; overflow reported to agents and vertical Align), type areas resized by their handles and reshaped with Direct Selection, threaded text, Fit Headline, Glyphs, OpenType panel, Find Font, installed system fonts in every font menu (fonts registered with Windows outside its font folders, the XDG and Flatpak host font folders on Linux, and fonts installed while the app runs, listed when it comes back to the front; searchable; the Character and Properties menus show each family's sample of the selected text, preview it live under the pointer or ↑/↓, filter by script and kind, list a family's styles, and star favourites; the Glyphs panel and Find Font's Replace With use the same menu without the live preview) and found by name on open/import, variable fonts' named instances as styles, CJK names in the UI, input methods (marked text in place, candidate window at the caret; Japanese IME), Text Wrap (offset, invert, both sides of an object; follows edits), Type on a Path effects and Options with draggable start/centre/end brackets (slide, flip), tab stops + Tabs panel (Above Text floats it over the selected text, its ruler at the canvas zoom so stops line up with the columns, #729), inline symbols in text (beyond parity), Hebrew/Arabic bidirectional text, Paragraph Direction, Every-line/Single-line Composer per object (ragged text too) done; tab leaders, spell check, vertical type pending	45–60
M8	Transform & distort (Puppet Warp, Liquify tools, Envelopes, Blends, Perspective Grid)	✅ done (M8.1–M8.20 on 2026-10-06, fidelity pass): Liquify Tool Options with one shared brush, pen pressure, hold-to-apply, a safe scope and incremental strokes; tool options that last; Puppet Warp rotation, multi-select, Control bar and a rest-shape session that follows Undo; Width tool on compound paths; Envelope dialogs with preview, Reset with Warp/Mesh, full Envelope Options, type/images/symbols/appearance/gradients/patterns distorted on canvas and in every export, warps that keep their frame, Edit Contents, mesh handles and Control bar; Blend Options, anchor-targeted Blend tool, editable spine, keys picked on the canvas, faithful interpolation and knockout; Perspective Grid with Define Grid, presets, lock/snap/rulers, widgets, the 1–4 plane switch, movable planes, Perspective Selection scale/copy/perpendicular/Transform Again, and type and symbols truly projected with Edit Text. Left: Anti-Alias and Preserve Shape output, warp-envelope point editing, brush interpolation in blends, Free Transform/Scale/Reflect along a rotated box	2–4
M9	Live effects (+ 3D & Materials)	🟡 2D effects done incl. Effect → Pathfinder and Color Adjustments; SVG Filters, Document Raster Effects Settings, 3D pending	86–135
M10	Brushes, symbols, patterns, Repeat	🟡 pattern swatches (5 tile types, Pattern Options, editing mode, SVG <pattern>/PDF export) and live Repeat (radial/grid/mirror) done; brushes/symbols in progress	23–37
M11	Artboards & views (artboard panel/tool with Move Artwork for X/Y fields and Artboard Options, Trim View, middle-button pan, print tiling and the status bar's artboard navigator done; multiple windows, presentation polish)	🟡	15–25
M12	Advanced color & art (CMYK/ICC, separations, Gradient Mesh, Live Paint, Image Trace, Graphs)	🟡 Gradient Mesh, Live Paint, Image Trace (13 presets, 18 ms/1k² image; the Flat Logo mode places edges to a fraction of a pixel, restores sharp corners, snaps lines and circles, and refuses gradients), Recolor Artwork, colour management (ICC, soft proofing, separations preview), Graphs (all 9 tools, Graph Data/Type, group-selected series colours persist through regenerate/save/open) done; graph Design/Column/Marker designs pending	6–10
M13	Automation (Actions ✅ record/playback, persisted; variables, scripting, batch)	🟡	18–27
M14	1.0 polish (preferences, shortcut editor, workspaces, accessibility, packaging for all OSes)	🟡 Preferences, shortcut editor (chords with Shift and a punctuation key fire as typed), workspaces, a custom title bar on Windows/Linux with a Home button, content-sized dialogs, menus that scroll when longer than the window and macOS native menu dismissal done (M14.8); an experimental, unsupported Windows 7 x64 portable OpenGL build (not verified by maintainers); accessibility and broader Windows/Linux packaging/QA pending	18–28
—	Interaction fidelity pass (every tool's modifiers, Properties panel per context, isolation, nuance)	⬜	60–90
—	Hardening at scale (big-file corpus, fuzzing, cross-platform + browser QA)	🟡	50–80
	Total to full parity (one agent; re-derived from the Parity estimate table)		~320–500

Parity estimate

Method (2026-10-02; M3 rows re-derived 2026-10-04, file, export, print, links and UI-chrome rows after M4 on 2026-10-05): Illustrator's feature surface is split into 22 areas, weighted by how much of the app (and of real users' work) each represents. Each area is scored by depth of behaviour, not by presence of a menu item: an area is 100% only when every feature in it behaves like Illustrator. Feature parity = Σ weight × score / Σ weight. Remaining time is counted per area from what is missing, calibrated on measured throughput: in the last session one agent landed about 20 medium features (Text Wrap, Graphs, Effect → Pathfinder, export baking…) in ~16 h wall clock including builds and CI on a heavily loaded machine — about 0.8 h per medium feature; large subsystems (3D, raster filters, vertical type) are counted bottom-up. The M3 rows (colour, strokes, appearance) come from a detailed 92-task M3 plan whose review found more missing depth than the first estimate; all 92 tasks landed on 2026-10-04 and 2026-10-05 with 6–8 agents in parallel; its packages, planned at 5–11 h each, took about 1–1.5 agent-hours each, so the other rows (estimated on the older scale) are likely high.

Area	Weight	Done	Missing (main items)	One agent (h)
Selection, transform & align tools	6	85%	Free Transform/Scale/Reflect along a rotated box, Start Global Edit, transform nuances (the rotated persistent bounding box is done)	4–6
Drawing tools	7	85%	rough-square Shaper recognition and orientation steps corrected; editable Shaper Groups landed; remaining: Shaper construction widget/gesture refinements, pencil and the remaining pen modifier nuances, the freehand Tool Options' Keep selected, Alt to the Smooth tool, Blob Brush Merge Only with Selection and brush angle/roundness, Touch Type, Live Corners on corners between curved sides (and Relative rounding)	8–13
Path operations, Pathfinder, Shape Builder, Live Paint	5	86%	Live Paint gap options, Shape Builder gap detection, options (Tool Options dialog, clicking a stroke in merge mode) and Shift-drag marquee	3–6
Colour, swatches, gradients, patterns, mesh, recolor	7	96%	freeform and mixed spot/process gradients in SVG/PDF (exported as stops or process colours), pattern fills in Expand	2–4
Strokes, brushes, width profiles	5	89%	Scatter, Art and Pattern Brush Options (Calligraphic and Bristle done), brush libraries (generated in code), pen pressure on macOS (the windowing layer reports none there), brushes driven by pen tilt, bearing and barrel rotation (6D art pens)	10–18
Appearance, transparency, graphic styles, masks	5	98%	raster effect reach in preview bounds (flattener presets apply in PDF, EPS and print)	1–2
Live vector effects	5	85%	Outline Object, Pathfinder Hard/Soft Mix and Trap, SVG Filters, the Transform effect's Transform Objects/Patterns and Scale Strokes & Effects options	6–10
Raster effects (Effect Gallery, Document Raster Effects Settings)	4	28%	~47 Photoshop-style filters (Artistic, Brush Strokes, Distort, Sketch, Stylize, Texture, Video), Smart Blur's Edge Only / Overlay Edge modes and the Effect Gallery; Document Raster Effects Settings, raster effects in PDF, the pixel-filter pipeline, Radial Blur, Smart Blur, Unsharp Mask, Glowing Edges and Pixelate (Color Halftone, Crystallize, Mezzotint, Pointillize) are done	24–37
3D and Materials	4	0%	Extrude & Bevel, Revolve, Inflate, Rotate, lighting, materials (software renderer)	50–80
Type core	9	80%	Middle Eastern features beyond bidi layout and Paragraph Direction (Character Direction, digit types, kashidas, the Middle Eastern composers, editable bidirectional SVG text, a split caret where directions meet); Hyphenation… and Justification… options (Every-line Composer for justified and ragged text, per object, is done; it is tuned by eye, not yet compared side by side with Illustrator; mixed type sizes in a paragraph still break single-line), Optical Margin Alignment, paragraph spacing limit for vertically justified area type, hidden characters, paragraph attributes in the Type tool's copy and paste (the characters keep their styles, the paragraphs take the destination's), mixed-value display in the Paragraph panel for a selection across differing paragraphs, Transform Again after a type-area resize (it scales the type), partial selection of type-area anchors by marquee	14–19
Type advanced	4	50%	CJK composition for vertical type (ruby, mojikumi beyond Line-end Punctuation Half Width — the other sets (and their paragraph-start bracket and indent rules), custom kinsoku sets (beyond Hard, Soft and None) and the Mojikumi Settings dialog —, proportional vertical metrics, manual tate-chu-yoko), variable font axis sliders (named instances are styles), tab leaders, spell check (open dictionary), Touch Type, Retype; vertical point/area/path type and Type Orientation have initial support (beyond parity, not scored: inline symbols in text)	20–28
Symbols, blends, envelopes, Repeat, perspective	5	88%	symbol libraries (original), dynamic symbols, envelope Anti-Alias/Preserve Shape output and warp point editing, brush interpolation in blends (M8 fidelity pass done)	5–8
Image Trace, graphs, image tools	3	72%	graph Design/Column/Marker artwork (series colours set with Group Selection are done), Create Object Mosaic, per-feature stroke/fill choice and varying widths in Image Trace's Create Strokes (Vector Halftone and the Image Trace View modes, Palette and Create Strokes are done)	6–10
Layers, artboards, document setup	5	82%	Layers panel: a confirmation before deleting layers that hold art, Collect for Export, row context menus, the Layer Options dialog for several rows with mixed values, Paste Remembers Layers for sublayers, drag-scrolling a long panel while dragging rows; artboard preset polish (Move Artwork for artboard X/Y edits, Rearrange All Artboards, Document Setup, New Document and the rest of the Layers panel are done)	4–7
View & navigation	3	70%	New View/Edit Views, multiple windows/arrange, Snap to Pixel/Glyph (print tiling is done)	9–14
Guides, grids, smart guides, snapping, rulers	3	85%	global/video rulers, Spacing Guides' distance readouts and spacing for resized or drawn art, Smart Guides' angle and distance readouts while drawing, Alt swapping a ruler guide's orientation, ruler guides selected together with art (marquee, Shift-click), ruler guides as Layers rows with their own lock and hide (#451: Lock Guides locks them all; Make Guides paths are Layers rows already) (dragging existing guides is done, #414; new guides snapping to side midpoints and artboards, and artboard guides, #451; the drawing tools snapping, with Construction Guides, #506; Spacing Guides for moves, #394; moves snapping to the grid, #740; ruler guides pulling drawn points with Smart Guides on, and "center" and "anchor" labels while hovering with the Selection tool, #812)	2–4
File formats	6	85%	Affinity export, and the rest of Affinity import (effects, adjustments, brushes, master pages, live symbol instances), DWG (no open spec: DXF instead), PSD placement as layers (Photoshop Import Options; the merged image is done), EPS checked against more real files users send (Inkscape files open as vectors; other generators' constructs are tested with programs written from the PostScript Language Reference only; CID-keyed CJK type and CCITTFaxDecode images not read), legacy .ai files saved without the prolog that defines their operators (their own operator set isn't read yet), the rest of Illustrator's editing data (appearances and live effects, symbols, pattern fills, brushes, placed files: #637), the remaining fidelity polish; EPS, DXF, EMF/WMF, TIFF, BMP, Targa, PSD export, SVGZ, PDF security, PDF/X, PDF layers, presets and Affinity import are done	6–10 (existing scope; Affinity export unestimated)
Export for Screens, Asset Export, slices, Save for Web	3	85%	polish only (all four are done)	2–4
Print, colour management, separations, flattener	3	80%	print preview fidelity (flattener presets in PDF and print, overprint in PDF and composite print, Print dialog, presets, PostScript, marks, separations, Print Tiling, print overprint/flattener/bitmap options and printer profile are done)	1–2
Automation	3	60%	Variables (data merge), scripting surface, batch	8–12
UI chrome (panels, contextual Properties, workspaces, prefs)	6	78%	macOS native menu dismissal fixed (M14.8); remaining: Variables, SVG Interactivity, Properties per context, Consolidate All Windows, floating panels outside the app window and docked into any group, context menus beyond the canvas (Links, Asset Export, CSS Properties, Attributes and the canvas context menu are done), about 17 Preferences options stored but not yet acted on (#394: Highlight Alternate Glyphs, Open Documents As Tabs, Real-time Drawing, hyphenation language, Appearance of Black, devices…)	14–22
Libraries, Links, Package	2	80%	the Libraries panel is local only (no cloud by design: libraries are files on this machine) and has no shared libraries, linked graphics or gradients and patterns as items yet; its graphics, colours and text styles are done (#745); Links and Package are done; placed VectorCraft documents are done (linked by default, vectors in every output, previews, Break Link, Expand, Edit Original, refresh on save)	2–3
Feature parity	103	~75%		~210–330
Interaction-fidelity pass (side by side with Illustrator: every tool modifier, cursor, dialog, Properties context)				60–90
Hardening (big-file corpus, fuzzing, cross-platform and browser QA, accessibility, packaging)				50–80
Full parity		~56%		~320–500

With 4–6 agents working on disjoint crates (as the layering allows) the wall-clock time divides by roughly 3.5–4 (integration, review and shared files such as menus.rs serialize some work): ~55–95 h to feature parity, ~80–145 h to full parity.

Inventories (2026-10-07): 13 menu items still stubbed (todo(…) in crates/ui-egui/src/menus.rs); every tool implemented except Touch Type; 51 panel modules; Illustrator-style live effects ~44/54, Photoshop-style raster effects ~4/56, 3D 0/5; ~2,840 tests; ~221k lines of Rust.

Where we already beat Illustrator: exact curve booleans, off-thread multithreaded rendering, undo that never runs out, lossless SVG/PDF export of live effects with SVG filters, a documented JSON format, the same app on the web, and every command, gesture and dialog drivable by agents (MCP, CLI, control channel).

Out of scope (by design or by law)

• Native .ai private data, beyond its structure: the app's own editing copy of a file (an EPS after its %%EOF, a .ai's AIPrivateData streams, Zstandard or zlib, the EPS's in ASCII85) is not documented as a whole. VectorCraft reads its structure: layers and sublayers (names, order, visibility, lock, printing, preview, dimming, colour), groups as they were nested, compound paths, clipping groups and layer clipping, object names, hidden and locked objects, fills and strokes (grey, CMYK, RGB, named and spot colours), linear and radial gradients, opacity, blend modes, isolation and knockout, embedded images with their alpha channel, guides, and every artboard where it is. An object with several fills or strokes, effects or a brush comes in as its drawn look (a group named after it). Type is made from the file's text document, whole and editable, shown or not: point type, area type (a story in several frames as threaded type) and type on a path, with its characters, fonts, size, leading, tracking, scaling, baseline shift, fill and stroke (grey, RGB or CMYK), alignment, indents and paragraph spacing; the page's drawing of it (often in pieces) is left out. Where the text document can't say (a frame of another kind, or a document that doesn't agree with the page), type that shows comes from the page into its text object's place (no group around it), and hidden type is left out with a note. Kerning, underline and the other character and paragraph options aren't read yet. A .ai saved without PDF compatibility (a placeholder page) opens from its editing data alone, its point type, area type and type on a path made from the text document. Symbols, pattern fills, placed files and anything else it doesn't read make the file come in as its page (on a layer that doesn't show, they are left out of that layer), with a warning saying what. The layers' art is also compared with the page (by lightness, so colours written as their CMYK equivalents compare alike, and by whether a pixel is inked at all); the page is used when they differ by more than 5%, where one draws an object the other doesn't (away from type, whose lines may be laid out afresh), and when an EPS whose page is its art's box has art printed outside it (#735). textAs: "outlines" opens a .ai whose type shows from its PDF part, which has the outlines; editingData: false opens any of them as its page or PDF part only, for print pipelines (#735). A file whose import left something out (hidden text, art or layers) is never written over by an export or Save As to its own path unless acknowledgeLoss: true (convert --replace-lossy), so the original keeps what the document lacks. Where a .ai can't be read that way (or its layers are turned off in the import options), we read its PDF-compatible part, so Illustrator-only live objects arrive as appearance, and plain groups arrive ungrouped: that part draws each object on its own and marks only layers, clipping groups and groups with opacity, blending or a mask (those come back). Art outside the artboards isn't in that part at all (Illustrator's PDF part leaves it out), so it doesn't open; the import says so in a note (#472). That part also has no paragraphs: area type is written line by line, and comes back as area type only where its font is installed and lays the lines out with the same breaks, else as a point type object per line (#508). Art off the page that a PDF does draw opens on the pasteboard.
• Adobe cloud services (Libraries sync, Adobe Fonts, Firefly/generative): these are pluggable provider APIs, not built in.
• Adobe's bundled assets (swatch/brush/symbol libraries, presets, icons): ours are original.

Where we aim to be better than Illustrator

• Speed: off-thread multithreaded rendering, instant startup, a responsive UI on huge files.
• Robustness: exact curve booleans (no "cannot perform operation"), property-tested undo/redo and file round trips.
• Openness: a documented native format, first-class SVG, and the same app in the browser.
• Automation: every command, gesture, dialog and widget is drivable by agents (JSON channel + MCP), with headless batch mode.

How to update this file

After each milestone task lands, update the status column and remaining estimates, and move items into "Shipped so far". Keep estimates honest: re-derive them from what remains, never from wishful velocity.