vectorcraft/ROADMAP.md

VectorCraft Roadmap

• UI.5: Shared docking adds tab reordering, docking into other groups, dock splits and resizable floating panel groups. Panel positions and return locations persist with workspaces; the native icon rail and Tools panel remain available.

• UI.4: Dock and floating-panel headers use shared accessible tabs with bounded overflow. Widget-state theme application uses craft-ui; all four palettes, font stacks and preferences remain app-owned.

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

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

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

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

Headline numbers

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

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

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

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

By dimension

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

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

Features

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

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

Languages

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

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

Upcoming

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

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

Progress log

Date	What landed
2026-10-11	Effect › Brush Strokes: Accented Edges, Angled Strokes, Crosshatch, Dark Strokes, Ink Outlines, Spatter, Sprayed Strokes, Sumi-e (G2). Command parameters from agents and files checked before anything changes (paint, place, cuts, dashes, crop, asset ids, anchors, paths, distort; #984–#999); command dialogs keep whole numbers whole, so Create Object Mosaic takes the tiles typed (#1000); stepper arrows take Shift (×10) and Ctrl/Cmd (÷10) like the arrow keys (#991). Exports and Rasterize supersample Art Optimized edges, so shapes meeting edge to edge leave no seam (#983). Character and paragraph styles take leading, kerning, mojikumi and the other attributes left out at their defaults (#1001). Drawing, typing and pasting with no layer shown and unlocked is refused instead of adding art to a hidden or locked layer (#1002). MCP add_text gives type on or in a path the colour asked for (#1003). MCP screenshot of a connected app renders the artboard asked for (#1004). vectorcraft-cli run ends quietly when its reader closes early (#1005). Select › All on Active Artboard selects on the artboard made active, not always the first (#1006). Reverse Gradient keeps off-centre midpoints, mirrored (#1007). A polar grid with no radial dividers draws none (#1008). Use Precise Cursors also covers the Pen's join pointer (#1009). SVGs with one absolute and one unitless root side import at their size, unstretched (#1010). DXF US survey inches, yards and miles open at their size and name (#1011). A file placed into a document with no other links follows its first change even while the app sits idle (#1031). PDF import keeps the style a font name says when the file doesn't embed the font (#1023). Shift selects ruler guides and art together, and Delete removes both (#1022). Open filled paths are hit by their fill on every side, the rotate cursor bows around the corner it is at, the flip icons match their flips, the Color Picker previews on the selection, and Properties › Transform reaches Scale Corners and Scale Strokes & Effects (#1036). Offset Path and the other booleans finish on outlines where the sweep used to loop until memory ran out (linesweeper 0.5, #1028). Floating panel groups stack into sets that move together, collapse to their tabs and dock as extra dock columns that scroll (#1020). Ruler guides live on layers: listed in the Layers panel, shown, hidden, locked, duplicated, merged and deleted with their layer, and moved between layers (#1021). A .ai whose editing data uses global process colours (Xk/XK) or pattern fills keeps its sublayers: the colours come in as global swatches at their tint, the patterns as pattern swatches (#1025). A .ai in PostScript form opens through its layers, read from the program itself, also when it names the prolog defining its operators without including it, as Rhino and other CAD apps write it (#1027). A fill or stroke chosen while the Type tool has characters selected colours just those characters (#1063). Scaled type shows its scaled font size, leading, baseline shift and horizontal scale in the Character panel, and a size typed there is the size you get (#1034). Character panel menu › Proportional Metrics sets Japanese and Chinese full-width glyphs on the font's proportional widths in horizontal type (#966). Align, Distribute, Move, Arrange, Lock, Hide, Ungroup and other Object commands that would change nothing no longer record an undo step or mark the document changed (#1060). Spot colours defined in Lab open with their Lab values from .ai and PDF files, instead of as wrong RGB colours or their CMYK equivalents (#1032). Build scripts leave a generated source they wouldn't change untouched, so the next build doesn't compile most of the workspace again where file times lose their sub-second part (#1051). A fill colour recolours the gradient mesh point last clicked with the Mesh tool or Direct Selection, and a Mesh tool click on a mesh's point selects that mesh (#1052). The All Tools drawer stays two tools wide instead of filling a wide window (#1054). Text Wrap's Make, Release and Options refuse a list of object ids with a malformed or unknown id instead of skipping it (#1055). A freeform gradient line with a malformed point index is refused instead of being shortened to the indices that are valid (#1056). The Corners dialog (ui.corners) refuses a malformed object id or a listed anchor that isn't a corner instead of editing the selection or the other corners (#1057). New View refuses a centre that isn't exactly [x, y] and a rotation that isn't a number, instead of trimming the one and saving the other as 0° (#1058). The command sweeps try junk scale, spacing and artboard values too, which they had skipped since before those bugs were fixed (#1059). EPS and PostScript arc and arcn with huge angles no longer hang the import, and an arc whose angles are whole turns apart is empty, as the PostScript reference defines it (#1062). Align and Distribute Spacing keep the key object still also when it is inside a selected group or compound path (#1074). A .ai whose layers can't be read yet still opens with its artboards where they were (in a grid, say), not in a row (#1068). Layer Options (ui.layerOptions) refuses a malformed or unknown row id instead of skipping it or opening on the highlighted rows (#1077). Shaper scribbles given a list of object ids refuse a malformed or unknown id instead of skipping it and editing the shapes that remain (#1078). Delete Width Point (stroke.widthPoint.remove) refuses a list of indices with a malformed entry instead of deleting the points that remain, and no longer wraps a huge index round on the web (#1079). Preferences' checkboxes have an outline when the pointer isn't over them, in every interface brightness, as the app's other dialogs' checkboxes do (#1080). The last plain checkboxes (Properties panel snapping and Scale Strokes & Effects, Revolve, Save options, Export for Screens, Variables, plug-in forms) keep a visible box at rest in every theme too (#885). Setting or copying a width point with a malformed index is refused instead of adding a new point or wrapping a huge index round (follow-up to #1079). An Illustrator EPS opened through its layers keeps its own page size and the red outline of text stacked over a dark one, as 0.8.0 did (#1102). The macOS DMG is built so the app in it passes codesign --verify --strict --deep, and the release checks that it does (#1085). Swatch and graphic style libraries, Libraries panel files, presets and plug-ins dropped on the window open as File › Open opens them instead of being placed on the canvas (#1083). A key object needs another selected object outside it: a change that leaves one object selected lets the key go, and one selected object aligns to the artboard whatever Align To says (#1088). Align to Artboard aligns to the active artboard, and actions play their Align to Artboard, All on Active Artboard and Paste in Place, in Front and in Back steps on the artboard active when they play (#1105). Align refuses a call with neither direction, and Align, Distribute, Reflect and Shear refuse a direction, axis, target or bounds they don't take instead of falling back to a default (#1106). object.setProps deselects the objects it hides or locks, the key object included, as the Layers panel's eye and lock do (#1107). Align, Distribute and Distribute Spacing move pattern tiles with the art when General › Transform Pattern Tiles is on (#1108). Object › Lock › All Artwork Above and Object › Hide › All Artwork Above deselect the selected objects they lock or hide, the key object included (#1109). Save Swatch Library's count is the number of swatches the file holds: .gpl and .ase hold solid colors only, and CSS leaves freeform gradients out (#1110). In a rotated view (Rotate View), an artboard's name stays at its own top-left corner (#1095). Ctrl+Shift+L, C, R, J and F align or justify the paragraphs of the selected type, or those the Type tool's selection touches (#1111). On macOS, file dialogs are sheets on the document window, so resizing one no longer crashes the app; while one is open the menus, Quit and Close wait, and its answer goes to the document that asked (#867). Shape Builder merges regions that crossing lines cut along the lines' own edges, so a strip merged across a grid of lines is one outline with no seams left inside (#1081). Proportional Metrics also works in vertical type: upright glyphs take the font's proportional heights (vpal), and Line-end Punctuation Half Width takes nothing more off the punctuation it re-spaced (#1082). Plug-in whole-number parameters keep their exact value however large, and stay in the range the manifest gives (#1091). PDF and .ai import keeps type spaced glyph by glyph (character tightening, optical kerning) with each glyph in its place, giving each character its own tracking when the file's font is installed, and CJK punctuation closed up by its proportional width continues its line (#1101). Direct Selection: pressing an anchor of a path selected whole keeps all its anchors selected, so the drag moves them all; Alt-dragging by an anchor copies the whole path, held by that anchor, which snaps onto other anchors and onto the original the copy leaves behind; Alt pressed or released during the drag turns the copy on and off, as with the Selection tool, whose copies snap to their original too, and the undo step is named Copy or Move for what the drag did (#1104). The toolbar's Fill/Stroke proxy and Color, Gradient and None buttons grow in two columns, where the three drawing modes sit side by side (#1129). An image copied in a browser that puts its <img> markup on the clipboard as text pastes as the picture, not the markup (#1089). file.place of an SVG with crop: "crop" frames and clips it by its viewBox, so art drawn on a shared canvas keeps its place and scale (#788). While a star is dragged, Ctrl/Cmd keeps its inner radius as the outer one grows and Alt keeps its shoulders straight (#812). Edit Toolbar opens the All Tools drawer beside the toolbar, dims the tools already in it, and adds, removes and moves tools by drag and drop while it is open (#1018). The Selection tool's arrow is black and Direct Selection's white in every theme, as users know them: in the dark themes they looked swapped. The font menu keeps its highlight on the same font when the list changes under it (a family's styles listed above it, fonts that finish loading, a favourite unstarred), and ends the live preview when that font leaves the list (#1116). The Windows installer has a Shortcuts page with a ticked "Create a desktop shortcut" box, and a silent install adds the shortcut unless INSTALLDESKTOPSHORTCUT="" is passed (#1128). Image Trace's Noise merges specks until none under its size is left beside another colour, so a higher Noise never gives more paths (#1130). cargo clippy -D warnings passes for the wasm32 web build (#1132). Gradient stops with opacity blend colour and opacity apart on the canvas, as Illustrator and the PDF and SVG exports do: a transparent stop's colour still tints the fade (#1142). An SVG mask whose art is all hidden imports as an empty opacity mask, so its object stays hidden as browsers draw it (#1143). Shift-click with the Artboard tool, or in the Artboards panel, selects several artboards, which then move, duplicate (Alt-drag) and delete together (#1139). A shape far beyond any page (from a malformed file) is left undrawn instead of making the renderer abort the app.
2026-10-10	Initial live Revolve (Effect › 3D and Materials, #846, #605), in its own three-d crate. Progress docs re-measured and restructured to the craftrules standard (this page, docs/target-app-parity.md, gaps.md, ui-parity.md, the format, hardware, localization, effects and type checklists). Same day: v0.8.0; Effect › Distort, Pixelate and Texture filters (13); German interface; Variables (data merge); Graph Type value axes and tick marks; restart when the first frame never reaches the screen (#964)
2026-10-09	Radial Blur, Smart Blur, Unsharp Mask (gap 2 begins); 340 commits, the busiest day
2026-10-08	v0.5.0–v0.7.0; community contributions: Pen and shape-tool modifiers, Layers, Artboards, Japanese composition, Hebrew/Arabic type, interface languages, saved selections
2026-10-07	v0.4.0; issue fixes; Layers panel rework
2026-10-06	M8 transform and distort fidelity pass (M8.1–M8.20)
2026-10-05	M4 files done (M4.14–M4.98); M3 paint and appearance done (92 tasks over two days)
2026-10-02	First weighted parity estimate (22 areas); look and feel measured against public screenshots
2026-10-01	Renamed from DrawCraft to VectorCraft
2026-09-30	Repository history begins

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

Revision history

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