DesignCraft

DesignCraft is a free InDesign alternative: an open source page layout app for Mac, Windows and Linux with spreads and parent pages, frames and threaded stories, paragraph, character and object styles, swatches, text wrap, tables, footnotes, cross-references and an index, and export to PDF with embedded fonts, CMYK and spot separations, bleed and marks. It is a native app written in Rust, it runs offline, and it never asks for a subscription, an account or a card.

DesignCraft is a clean-room reimplementation of InDesign, so the Control panel, the Pages, Layers, Swatches, Styles, Character, Paragraph, Stroke and Text Wrap panels, the Pen and Direct Selection tools, snapping and smart guides, Find and Change with GREP, the Story Editor and Quick Apply all sit where you expect, down to the shortcuts. Documents are facing or single spreads with parent pages, sections and page-number markers, layers, text, graphic and unassigned frames, stories that thread across frames and spreads, and a Links panel that knows when a placed image has changed on disk. Preflight and Find Font flag missing fonts before they reach a printer.

The project is young, its first commit was 1 October 2026, and it says so: it aims at full InDesign parity and is moving fast, with a status list in its roadmap rather than a finished feature set. For a brochure, a report or a magazine built from styles, frames and placed images, the pieces are there today.

Paragraphs are composed with a Knuth-Plass composer, the same approach as InDesign's paragraph composer, with dictionary hyphenation, word, letter and glyph-scaling justification, keep options, widows and orphans, optical margin alignment, columns, baseline grid, tabs, rules, shading, bullets and numbering, vertical justification and overset detection. Line breaks are identical on screen and in the PDF.

PDF export writes real selectable text with embedded font subsets, DeviceCMYK and RGB with spot separations, bleed boxes, crop and bleed marks, pages or spreads, tagged structure with alt text, hyperlinks and bookmarks, and PDF/A-2b with a PDF/X-4 output intent. IDML import and export carry swatches, styles, parent spreads, frames, groups, images and formatted threaded stories, so a document can move to or from InDesign. PNG export covers proofs, and the native format is documented JSON.

Native builds for every desktop: a universal macOS app with a native menu bar, Windows installers for x64, x86 and ARM64 with no emulation, Linux AppImage, deb, rpm and Flatpak packages, and FreeBSD. There is also a browser build you can host yourself. Rendering is multithreaded SIMD, undo snapshots are instant, and nothing phones home.

DesignCraft is MIT or Apache 2.0 licensed, built by the ArtCraft Team with more than 2,100 stargazers behind it, and free for good: no monthly fee, no licence server, no features behind a paywall. Every menu item, tool gesture, panel control and dialog can be driven over a JSON control channel and an MCP server, so Claude or another agent can lay out and edit a document like a designer; the sample magazine in the package was built entirely that way.

The complete source of release 0.5.0 as published by the ArtCraft Team, with the project's own MIT and Apache 2.0 notices inside, plus an install guide written for this listing that covers the prebuilt installers for each platform, the browser build and building from source, and a Claude prompt that walks you through setup.