House rules

These apply in every Craft repository. A later rule may be stricter, not weaker. The source is standards/house-rules-core.md in storytold/craft-contrib. Propose changes there, not in a copy.

1. A person is accountable. Whoever runs an agent answers for what it opens and for its review comments.
2. Check, then claim. Before writing code, read the issue comments, search pull requests for #N and the keywords, and check recent commits on main. Comment on the issue first. Release a claim you will not finish.
3. Verify, don't guess. Open a definition before using it. Confirm the cause in the code, even when someone names a location.
4. Keep fixes narrow and tested. Fix what the issue describes, where the bug is. Add a test that fails without the fix.
5. Review the diff before opening a pull request. Identifiers exist as used, the test fails without the fix, nothing unrelated changed, and the description is true.
6. Look for a better pull request. If another fixes the same thing, close yours when it is better or equal, and say why.
7. Report only what ran. Say what you tested and what you could not run. Without a local build or test, say so and rely on CI before marking ready.
8. main changes through a pull request. Do not push to it. Branch protection enforces this. There is no exception.
9. Stop and ask only about licensing outside the allowlist, publishing, releases, a new remote, secrets, spending money, destructive git, and anything else hard to undo. Otherwise keep working. plan/ is a gitignored notebook, not rules. Without it, do not ask for it and do not stop.
10. Keep secrets and personal details out of the repository, logs and requests.
11. CI stays shared. Workflows call storytold/craft-common-actions. Do not change CI in a feature or fix pull request. If CI cannot cover a change, open an issue there.
12. Guards say why. A check that looks removable says what it prevents. Read that before changing it.
13. Instructions must be readable by everyone. No notes about one machine, and no links to files a reader cannot open. craftrules is retired. Do not link to it.
14. Keep pull requests moving. Concurrent pull requests are fine; unanswered actionable feedback is not. Respond in 7 days, a reminder at 14, closure eligible at 30, from when an actionable request waits on the author. Suggestions and unconfirmed bot findings do not start the clock. A fix, explanation or agreed plan resets it; unrelated activity does not. Waiting on a reviewer or maintainer pauses it and does not count against the author. A maintainer decides closure; it is never automatic. Reuse search results, do not poll, and stop at a rate limit.
15. No agent attribution. A pull request does not say an agent wrote it. A repository rule may not require that.

Rust Craft repositories

These apply to native Craft apps and to shared Rust libraries. Select them by repository type. A repository that merely contains some Rust does not take this block. Rules later in a repository's file may be stricter, but not weaker. The source is standards/house-rules-rust.md in storytold/craft-contrib.

1. Never crash. Non-test code does not panic and has no unsafe, except where the repository file names an exception. Return errors, treat input as hostile, and bound recursion and allocations. New production crate roots copy the deny attribute from an existing crate: clippy::unwrap_used, clippy::expect_used, clippy::panic, clippy::unimplemented, clippy::todo, clippy::unreachable. Every crash fix comes with a test that panicked before the fix.
2. Clean room. Learn from observed behaviour and public specifications. Do not copy another product's code, assets, strings or artwork. Check a dependency's licence before adding it.
3. Assets and fonts. Every asset is original or suitably licensed, and is recorded in ATTRIBUTION.md in the same change. Font files live in storytold/craft-fonts, not in the app repository.
4. Rust only for native Craft apps. No handwritten JavaScript or TypeScript, and no Tauri, Electron or webview shell, in those apps. Shared tooling follows its documented technical scope and maintainer-approved exceptions. Craft PR Review's existing Tauri and TypeScript UI is one such exception. It does not relax this rule for native apps. Preserve any existing web build.
5. Time goes through chrono. Do not hand-roll calendar conversion. For dates beyond what chrono can represent, follow standards/time.md.
6. Contributor credits. Add or edit only your own person's entry in contributors/people.toml, and only after asking them. Never guess a name or hand-edit contributors.json.

Licence allowlist

Dependencies and assets use SPDX identifiers. An expression is allowed when every identifier is in this list. A repository may name a shorter list. It may not add an identifier here by editing its own copy of these rules.

• ISC
• MIT
• BSD-2-Clause
• BSD-3-Clause
• Apache-2.0
• OFL-1.1
• Ubuntu-font-1.0
• Bitstream-Vera
• CC0-1.0
• CC-BY-4.0
• CC-BY-SA-4.0
• LicenseRef-Public-Domain

LicenseRef-Storyteller-Trademark is not in this list. It covers Storyteller brand marks only, where a repository already says so.

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

Read ROADMAP.md and docs/gaps.md. plan/ is an optional gitignored notebook (status, execution notes, plan/indesign/*.md). Do not ask for it and do not stop when it is absent.

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.

• 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.
• Shared test corpora. Real-file test oracles (Photoshop-authored PSDs, etc.) live in storytold/photocraft-corpus. 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.
• 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, when available, compare with plan/indesign/02-ui-ux.md / 11-observed-ui.md. Without those optional notes, verify the intended behaviour against the task and committed documentation. 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.
• 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. 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; 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) 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.

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.

New workspace crates include workspace = true under [lints] in Cargo.toml. Production crate roots declare the crate-level lint attributes before modules; crate-level //! documentation may precede them.