DesignCraft

Page layout and publishing; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe InDesign, rebuilt in pure Rust.

A fast, open-source, clean-room take on the Adobe InDesign workflow. It runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux, and in the browser via WebAssembly.
By the ArtCraft team.

DesignCraft on getartcraft.com · ArtCraft · All Crafting Apps

_{Quarterly, Spring Issue: threaded three-column body text, a wrapped pull quote and parent-page folios, all set by DesignCraft's own paragraph composer.}

[!NOTE] ArtCraft is a community of artists from all walks of life. Digital, generative, music, games — if you make things, you're one of us. Come say hi on Discord.

The sample magazine · Why DesignCraft · Quick start · Web · Architecture · The Crafting Apps · License

The sample magazine

Every page below was laid out by DesignCraft from code (crates/engine/src/sample.rs) and exported by its own renderer. Try it yourself with File → New → Sample Document, or start the app with --sample.

Why DesignCraft

• Familiar. InDesign's layout, tools, menus, panels and shortcuts: spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, the Control panel, paragraph and character styles, swatches, text wrap and more. If you know InDesign, you already know how to use it.
• Beautiful type. A Knuth–Plass paragraph composer (plus single-line), dictionary hyphenation (the public-domain Moby word list plus our own trained patterns), word, letter and glyph-scaling justification, keeps, optical margin alignment, columns, baseline grid, tabs, rules and shading. Line breaks are identical on screen and in PDF.
• Fast. Multithreaded SIMD rendering (vello_cpu), copy-on-write documents with O(1) undo snapshots, and cached composition.
• Open. A documented native format, IDML import and export, PNG export, and PDF on the roadmap. No subscription, no licence server, no telemetry.
• Agent-native. Every menu item, tool gesture, panel control and dialog can be driven over a JSON control channel and an MCP server, so Claude and other agents can lay out and edit documents like a designer. See docs/control-protocol.md and docs/mcp.md.
• Everywhere. One Rust codebase for desktop and the web.

Quick start

cargo run --release -p designcraft                         # desktop app (start screen)
cargo run --release -p designcraft -- --sample             # open the sample magazine
cargo run --release -p designcraft -- --sample --control 7979   # + JSON control channel
cargo run --release -p designcraft-cli -- run --sample --all-pages out/       # headless: render every page to PNG
cargo run --release -p designcraft-cli -- commands         # list every command
cargo xtask ci                                             # fmt, clippy, tests, assets, layering, wasm

To drive a running app, send JSON lines to 127.0.0.1:7979. The protocol is described in docs/control-protocol.md.

Web

cd apps/designcraft-web && trunk build --release          # → dist/web (serve it with any static server)
cd apps/designcraft-web && trunk serve --release          # http://127.0.0.1:8767

You need trunk and the wasm32-unknown-unknown target. The same app runs through eframe's web runner on WebGPU, falling back to WebGL2 (?webgl forces it; ?sample opens the sample magazine). Open and Place use the browser's file picker, and dropping files works too. Save and Export download the file. The web build has no control channel.

Architecture

DesignCraft is an engine-first Cargo workspace with enforced layering (cargo xtask layers). The egui frontend is a separate crate, so the UI can be swapped without touching the engine.

• Status and milestones: ROADMAP.md
• Contributor and agent rules (clean-room, asset policy, quality gates): AGENTS.md
• Bundled assets: every one is listed with its licence in ASSETS.md
• App icon and colour: a calico cat in a polka-dot scarf on DesignCraft green #7bb51c; see assets/app-icon/

The Crafting Apps

DesignCraft is one of the Crafting Apps: free, open-source creative tools from the ArtCraft team, each written from scratch in Rust and each able to stand on its own.

And ArtCraft itself, our AI image and video studio for artists who want real control.

Come make things with us

Our Discord is where artists of every kind hang out: people who paint, shoot, draw, cut film, set type, and people still figuring out what they like to make. Share what you're working on, ask for help, tell us what's broken, or tell us what you wish these tools could do. Whatever your medium and however long you've been at it, you're welcome here.

discord.gg/artcraft · getartcraft.com · The Crafting Apps · DesignCraft

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0 (LICENSE-MIT, LICENSE-APACHE). Bundled fonts are OFL; all icons are drawn in code and are original. Per-asset attribution is in ASSETS.md (see also NOTICE).

_{Adobe, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. DesignCraft is an independent, open-source project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Adobe Inc.; these names are used only to describe the workflows it is compatible with.}

_{Made by the ArtCraft team and community.}