DesignCraft

DesignCraft is a page layout and desktop publishing app that mirrors the Adobe InDesign workflow — spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, the Control panel, paragraph and character styles, swatches and text wrap — as free, open-source software in pure Rust from the ArtCraft team.

Typography is its centre of gravity: a Knuth–Plass paragraph composer (with single-line mode), dictionary hyphenation, word, letter and glyph-scaling justification, keeps, optical margin alignment, columns, a baseline grid, tabs, rules and shading. Line breaks are identical on screen and in export, and CMYK process swatches sit alongside named colours for print orientation. Rendering is multithreaded SIMD via vello_cpu, with copy-on-write documents giving O(1) undo snapshots.

Interchange starts honest: IDML import and export means InDesign workflows move both ways, PNG export works today, and PDF export is on the public roadmap. Documents use a documented native format, and there is no subscription, licence server or telemetry. DesignCraft runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux and as a WebAssembly web build, with sample documents built in (File → New → Sample Document) and an MCP server plus control channel for agentic layout.