DesignCraft · Alternative to InDesign
DesignCraft: Free, Open-Source InDesign Alternative
DesignCraft is an open-source, clean-room page layout and publishing app in pure Rust that follows the Adobe InDesign workflow.
- Pre-alpha
- v0.6.0 · October 11, 2026
- GitHub ★ 2.8k
- MIT / Apache-2.0
What DesignCraft does
Familiar InDesign layout
Spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, the Control panel, paragraph and character styles, swatches and text wrap.
Knuth–Plass type engine
Knuth–Plass composer, dictionary hyphenation, optical margin alignment, baseline grid and justification, with identical line breaks on screen and in PDF.
Fast CPU rendering
Multithreaded SIMD rendering with vello_cpu, copy-on-write documents with O(1) undo snapshots, and cached composition.
Open formats
A documented native format, IDML import and export, and PNG, PDF/X-4, PDF/A-2b and EPUB export, with no subscription or licence server.
Built-in sample magazine
File → New → Sample Document, or --sample, opens a magazine laid out entirely from code and exported by its own renderer.
File formats
- Native document format (documented JSON, read/write)
- IDML (read/write)
- PDF (export; PDF/X-4, PDF/A-2b)
- EPUB (export)
- PNG (export)
How mature is it?
Pre-alpha: it fails the core-workflow gate because stories cannot be threaded by hand, though the project estimates ~80% feature breadth and ~47% ready for real work.
Biggest gaps
- Manual text threading: the in and out ports are drawn, but clicking the out port does nothing and there is no thread or unthread command.
- INDD files cannot be opened, and IDML still has to be proven on real files.
- Composition has not been compared with InDesign's, and basic editing still needs fixing on Windows and Linux.
Automation and AI agents
Every menu item, tool gesture, panel control and dialog can be driven over a JSON control channel and an MCP server; designcraft-cli also renders pages headless. The web build has no control channel.