designcraft/AGENTS.md

DesignCraft — instructions for agents

DesignCraft is a clean-room, open-source, Rust-native page-layout application targeting Adobe InDesign parity — and superiority (speed, openness, agent control). It runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux, and on the web via WASM. Siblings with the same conventions: ../vectorcraft (Illustrator-class), ../photocraft (Photoshop), ../pdfcraft (Acrobat), ../filmcraft (Premiere), ../lightcraft (Lightroom).

Start every session here

1. Read plan/STATUS.md (current milestone, next task), then the task in plan/execution-plan.md and the relevant plan/architecture.md section. Behaviour reference: plan/indesign/*.md (11-observed-ui.md holds measured observations of the running app).
2. Follow the autonomous operation protocol (plan/execution-plan.md §7). Don't stop to ask unless §7 lists the decision as the user's.

plan/ is gitignored (local only).

Never crash

People trust DesignCraft with their layouts; a crash loses their work. This outranks feature work: never ship a feature through a panic path, and fix a crash before building on top of it. Standard: craftrules/standards/never-crash.md.

• No panics in non-test code: no unwrap(), expect(), panic!, unreachable!, todo!, unimplemented!; no unsafe (unsafe_code = "forbid"). The one exception is a provably infallible literal (a constant regex, write! to a String): #[allow(clippy::expect_used)] + .expect("why it cannot fail").
• Errors are Result<T, E> through the crate's error type and ? (ok_or(..)?, let … else, if let, map_err for context). An unfinished feature returns an "unsupported" error. Don't unwrap_or_default() where a silent default would corrupt a document; return an error.
• Input-derived numbers are hostile (files, commands, MCP/control params, settings): get() instead of [i]/[a..b], slice strings at char boundaries, checked/saturating arithmetic for lengths and offsets, no division by zero or NaN casts, cap input-sized allocations.
• Bound recursion (seen-sets or depth limits for nested or cyclic documents). Locks: lock().unwrap_or_else(PoisonError::into_inner) or an error; thread joins are Results.
• Last-resort guard: escaped panics during command execution and file import/export become an error, never a lost document. It's a safety net, not a licence.
• Prove it: every crash fix lands with a small synthetic regression test that panicked before the fix.
• Clean crates carry #![deny(clippy::unwrap_used, clippy::expect_used, clippy::panic, clippy::unimplemented, clippy::todo, clippy::unreachable)]; new crates start with it. Tests may unwrap (clippy.toml).

Non-negotiables

• Clean-room. InDesign is installed on the dev machine and may be observed black-box: run it, use its UI with synthetic documents, take screenshots (by window id) stored only under plan/indesign/screenshots/ (never committed). Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the InDesign bundle (names/listings only), never copy Adobe icons, artwork, presets or wording beyond feature names, never commit files produced by InDesign. Never copy GPL/AGPL/LGPL code (Scribus, LibreOffice, Ghostscript…).
• Assets: no Adobe iconography or images — ever. Every asset is original / OSI / CC0 / redistributable CC (except the ArtCraft trademarks in docs/brand/, under docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt) and has a row in ASSETS.md (cargo xtask assets enforces it). Prefer art generated in code.
• Fonts live in storytold/craft-fonts, never in this repo: don't commit new font files (the Latin UI/document fonts already in assets/fonts/ stay). It is an optional build input, never a Cargo.toml dependency: CRAFT_FONTS_DIR=/abs/path/to/craft-fonts cargo build makes crates/fonts/build.rs embed its fonts as designcraft_fonts::CRAFT_FONTS (Japanese: BIZ UDPGothic for the UI, Mincho first for document text; web builds embed BIZ UDPGothic Regular only). Unset, CRAFT_FONTS is empty and the app uses its bundled and system fonts; code and tests must work that way (tests on its glyphs skip). Releases build with it. Standard: craftrules standards/fonts.md.
• Shared test corpora. Real-file test oracles (Photoshop-authored PSDs, etc.) live in storytold/photocraft-corpus, explained in craftrules standards/test-corpora.md. Never commit large binary fixtures to this repo; fetch them pinned by commit and sha256-verified, as PhotoCraft does with cargo xtask corpus.
• Everything is a command. User-visible behaviour = a command in crates/engine/src/cmd/* (id, label, menu path, shortcut, params doc, enabled, run) + tests. Tools emit commands (Begin/Preview/Commit). UI-only commands live in crates/ui-egui/src/menus.rs (UI_COMMANDS). The control channel and MCP reach all of them.
• Layering is enforced by cargo xtask layers. Nothing below L6 depends on egui/eframe/winit/rfd. The UI crate is swappable.
• The UI is thin: panels read engine state and act through app.run(id, params). Colours come from theme::Tokens.
• Time goes through chrono (workspace dependency). Never hand-roll UTC/calendar conversion (days-to-date algorithms, leap-year math). A crate owns only its output format string. The one exception is range extension: past the years chrono can represent, shift the date by whole 400-year Gregorian cycles (146,097 days, after which the calendar repeats), let chrono compute the month and day, and add the cycles back to the year (splitting seconds into hours, minutes and seconds is plain arithmetic).
• Rust only (no handwritten JS/TS). Never break wasm (cargo xtask wasm).
• Quality gates before every commit: cargo xtask ci (fmt, clippy -D warnings, tests, assets, layers, wasm). One task id per commit (M2.1: type tool caret navigation).

Running and looking at the app

• cargo run --release -p designcraft -- --sample --control 7979 (sample magazine + control channel).
• Drive it: JSON lines on 127.0.0.1:7979, e.g. {"id":1,"method":"engine.execute","params":{"command":"frame.create","params":{"rect":[36,36,300,200],"content":"text"}}} then {"id":2,"method":"ui.screenshot","params":{"path":"/tmp/shot.png"}}. Methods: crates/ui-egui/src/control.rs, docs: docs/control-protocol.md.
• For UI work, look at the result (take ui.screenshot, read the PNG) and compare with plan/indesign/02-ui-ux.md / 11-observed-ui.md. If no frame is presented (screen locked) use ui.render or designcraft-cli run --sample --all-pages DIR.
• Headless: designcraft-cli run --sample --cmd 'frame.create={"rect":[0,0,100,100]}' --export out.png.
• Shell gotcha: mv/cp are aliased interactive here — use /bin/mv -f / /bin/cp -f.
• Parallel agents: separate CARGO_TARGET_DIR per agent; edit only the crates you own; delete your target dir when done (disk).

Roadmap

ROADMAP.md (committed) is the one-page summary: stage, headline numbers, dimensions, languages, progress log. It follows craftrules' standards/progress-docs.md. Details: docs/target-app-parity.md (assessment), docs/gaps.md (ranked work list: pick from the top), docs/roadmap.md (milestones, current focus), docs/parity-checklist.md (presence checklist, cargo xtask parity), and the typography, file-format, UI, hardware and localization parity docs in docs/. When work lands, update the affected docs and their status lines, delete or shrink the closed gap, and add a progress-log line to ROADMAP.md.

Contributor credits (About window)

• About ▸ Contributors/Models are compiled into the binary from contributors/contributors.json (commit stats; generated, never hand-edit) and contributors/people.toml (names people chose for themselves). See docs/contributors.md.
• Agents working for a contributor: when you prepare a PR, check whether your human's GitHub username has a [people.<username>] entry in contributors/people.toml. If not, ask them once whether they want to be credited by more than their username: a real name, a display name, and/or their public GitHub profile name (sync_github_name = true). If yes, add only their own entry (copy the template at the top of the file, or run python3 ../../craftrules/scripts/contributors.py --add-me . --real-name "…" --sync-github-name) and include it in their PR, committed as them. If no, change nothing: they are credited as @username anyway.
• Never add, edit, guess or copy anyone else's entry or name (not from git config, commit authors or GitHub profiles). Never hand-edit contributors.json.
• Maintainers refresh the stats with python3 ../../craftrules/scripts/contributors.py . (it also re-verifies who wrote each people.toml entry; --check only verifies).

CI workflows

• Workflows in .github/workflows/ call the shared workflows in storytold/craft-common-actions at @main, with their inputs and secrets. No other jobs: if no shared workflow does what's needed, it doesn't go here.
• Don't add or change CI in a feature or fix PR. If the existing workflows can't build or test a change, link an existing craft-common-actions issue or PR, or open a new issue, or a PR only for a small fix that is safe for every app and does not increase CI time.
• Some workflow files here still run their own jobs. Don't add to them. Moving a job into craft-common-actions is its own task, never part of another PR, and the job stays here until a shared workflow runs it.