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photocraft/docs/ui-design.md

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UI design system

Themes

Theme Intent
Pro (default) Photoshop-style Spectrum dark: flat charcoal panels (#323232), dark tab strips, Spectrum blue accent (#378ef0), pill buttons, checkboxes, compact 12 px type
Studio Dark studio style: near-black, rounded cards, pill tabs, violet accent, toggles
Studio Light Studio on light surfaces
Classic Windows-2000 bevels, square corners, navy selection

Switch themes with the sun icon, Window → Theme, or ui.set {"theme":"classic"} over the control channel.

Rules

  • Colours and radii come from tokens. Read them with Tokens::get(ctx); never hard-code a colour in a widget.
  • Shared widgets live in widgets.rs: card (panel group; Pro renders a Photoshop tab strip), value_field, slider/slider_row, toggle/checkbox, primary_button/secondary_button, dropdown (with a chevron icon), hairline/vline.
  • Icons: Lucide SVGs in assets/icons (ISC licence), embedded via icon_data.rs. Regenerate that file when you add icons.
  • Fonts: Inter (UI) and JetBrains Mono (numbers), both OFL. Named families medium and semibold are available via theme::medium() and theme::semibold().
  • Photoshop layout grammar (Pro):
    • Essentials dock order: Color | Swatches, then Properties | Adjustments, then Layers | Channels | Paths (Layers fills the remaining height).
    • Options-bar labels end with a colon ("Size:").
    • Document tabs read "name @ 12.5% (RGB/8)".
    • Toolbar tool groups carry a corner triangle.
  • Verify every visual change with ui.screenshot, at several window sizes and in every theme.

Adding icons

curl -sfL -o assets/icons/<name>.svg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lucide-icons/lucide/main/icons/<name>.svg
# regenerate the embedded table
{ printf '%s\n' '//! Lucide icons (ISC licence), embedded and tinted at runtime.' '' 'pub static ICONS: &[(&str, &[u8])] = &['; \
  for f in assets/icons/*.svg; do n=$(basename $f .svg); echo "    (\"$n\", include_bytes!(\"../../../assets/icons/$n.svg\")),"; done; echo '];'; } \
  > crates/ui-egui/src/icon_data.rs

Interaction models (match Photoshop CC)

Feature Module Behaviour
Type tool type_tool.rs Click: point text with the placeholder "Lorem Ipsum" selected. Drag: paragraph box. Inline caret and selection drawn from the text engine layout. ⌥/⌘ word and line navigation, ↩ newline, ⌘↩ or Esc commits, a click outside commits. One history step per session (coalesce). A new layer is named after its text; an empty one is deleted.
Free Transform transform_tool.rs ⌘T. Corners scale proportionally (⇧ frees them); edges scale one axis; ⌥ scales about the reference point; ⌘-corner distorts; dragging outside rotates (⇧ snaps to 15°); dragging inside moves. Preview = document without the moving pixels + a textured 24×24 mesh. ↩ or a double-click commits via edit.transform {rect, quad}.
Quick layer pick quick_pick.rs macOS: ⌘⌥⌃-click with any tool selects the topmost visible layer with pixels under the pointer (layer.pickAt) without switching tools; the drag and release are swallowed. Windows/Linux have no third modifier distinct from the ⌃⌥ brush resize, so the gesture is a no-op there (use the Move tool's Auto-Select). A failed pick is a status-bar error.
Layers rows panels.rs Double-click: on the name renames in place; on the Background makes it a normal layer; on an adjustment or fill thumbnail opens its Properties; on a Smart Object thumbnail opens its contents (Edit Contents); anywhere else on the row opens Layer Style.
Layer masks panels.rs Clicking the mask thumbnail targets the mask (corner-bracket frame; the tab reads "Layer, Layer Mask/8"). Brush, eraser (paints background colour), gradient and bucket then send "target": "mask". Adjustment and fill layers target their mask automatically.
Levels / Curves tone.rs Histogram of the image below the adjustment. Curves: click to add a point, drag out to delete. Every change is a coalesced layer.setAdjustment, so one drag = one undo step and the canvas updates at full resolution on the GPU.

Where the font lacks a symbol (e.g. ∠ ↦ ▔), draw it with the painter or use a Lucide icon; never ship missing-glyph boxes. Check every new panel with the offscreen snapshot tool (docs/development.md).

Title bar

The app's top bar (panels::title_bar) starts with the brand mark (the app icon, brand.rs), then the menus, the document title and the workspace controls, like Photoshop's Ps tile and menu row.

  • Windows and Linux: the window has no OS decorations, so there is one bar, not two stacked. The top bar is the title bar (titlebar.rs): Minimize, Maximize/Restore and Close (red on hover, caption_close tokens) sit flush in the window's top-right corner, the free gap between the menus and the controls drags the window and a double-click there maximizes it, and invisible 5 pt edges (12 pt corners) resize it. Close runs File › Exit, so unsaved documents are asked about first.
  • macOS: the traffic lights sit over the integrated title strip (integrated_titlebar).
  • Narrow windows drop controls that are also in a menu before anything overlaps: Discord (Help › Discord), then the theme toggle, then search (Edit › Search), then the workspace switcher narrows (Window › Workspace).

Menus

menu_catalog.rs holds Photoshop's menu tree (standard command names, order, separators, default shortcuts). Items whose id matches an engine or UI command are live; others render disabled until implemented. Give new commands the catalogue's id (for example image.imageSize) and they light up in the right place automatically.

Menus never run off the window: the menu bar's menus and submenus scroll with arrows (menu_nav::level), and long right-click menus (Layers, canvas tools, Channels, Paths, document tabs) wrap their rows in widgets::menu_scroll, so they move up to fit and scroll only when taller than the visible window.

Automation for visual checks

Use ui.click {x,y}, ui.move, ui.key and ui.type (synthetic input in screen points) to open menus, popups and context menus, then ui.screenshot.

Preferences

Preferences has Apply, OK and Cancel. Apply saves the edited sections and keeps the dialog open; it is disabled when the values match the saved preferences. OK saves and closes. Cancel discards only changes made since the last successful Apply. A failed Apply leaves the draft open for correction. Settings marked for the next launch still require a restart.

High DPI and 4K displays

Edit → Preferences → Interface → UI Scale applies immediately. Auto follows the operating system's display scale (including fractional scales). For a 4K or larger monitor, Auto uses at least 200% so text and controls remain readable. Detection uses the current monitor, including portrait displays, and updates when the window moves between monitors. If monitor size is unavailable, Auto follows system DPI. The fixed choices (75% to 300%) set an absolute UI scale, allowing large 4K displays to use smaller controls when desired. Canvas zoom shortcuts continue to control the document independently of UI scaling.

Interface → UI Font Size changes interface text independently of UI Scale and canvas zoom. Tiny, Small (the default), Medium and Large use 10/12, 1, 14/12 and 16/12 of the theme's original font sizes, preserving the relative sizes of headings, captions and numeric fields. Apply or OK updates text immediately; the choice persists across launches and theme changes. CJK fallback fonts use the same size, including fonts loaded after the preference changes.

Localisation

Strings in code stay English and are the default lookup keys. crates/ui-egui/src/i18n maps them to display text at render time from one catalog per language (i18n/<code>.tsv; the format is documented in the header of ja.tsv). Command ids, menu paths used for logic, the control channel, the CLI and MCP always use the English ids and labels.

Languages shipped (complete_menus marks a catalog that covers every menu string and tl! literal; the tests enforce it):

  • English (en), the source language.

  • Japanese (ja), complete.

  • Simplified Chinese (zh-hans; see localization-zh-hans.md), complete.

  • Traditional Chinese (zh-hant), complete, in the vocabulary used in Taiwan; zh-TW, zh-HK, zh-MO and zh-Hant-* locales all resolve to it. The resolver distinguishes the two Chinese scripts, so neither catalog is shown to the other script's locales.

  • Spanish (es), complete.

  • Russian (ru), complete, with three plural forms (one|few|many, see plural_russian).

  • Korean (ko), complete, with one plural form.

  • French (fr), complete, with two plural forms (0 and 1 use the singular).

  • Czech (cs), complete, with three plural forms.

  • Indonesian (id), complete, with one plural form.

  • tr(lang, s) plain strings; tr_ctx when one English word needs different translations; tr_id(lang, command_id, label) for menu items (keyed by command id, English label as the fallback); trn(lang, n, one, other) for plurals; fmt fills {name} placeholders, which translators may reorder.

  • The language is Preferences › Interface › Language (interface.language: auto or a language code; auto follows the system locale, an unknown code falls back to auto).

  • Language changes apply without a restart; Preferences previews the chosen language until Apply or OK commits it. Cancel restores the committed language. Regional preference tags resolve through the same locale matcher. See localization.md.

  • To add a language: add <code>.tsv and one row in i18n::LANGUAGES (code, native name, catalog, plural rule). The dropdown, locale matching and the catalog tests (well-formed, no duplicates, placeholders and ellipses agree, command ids exist) pick it up. Set complete_menus once every menu string is translated; a test then enforces it. A language with more plural forms lists them all in @plural entries (Russian: one|few|many); the row's plural rule picks the form.

  • Translations are clean-room: written from the meaning of the English text in ordinary vocabulary, never from another product's localisation resources.

Localised so far: menus, the command palette, dialogs and panels (literals wrapped in tl!("…"); widgets such as checkbox, slider_row, dropdown and the buttons translate their labels themselves). A test fails when a tl! literal, a menu string, a blend mode name, brush section name or a generated preference label has no entry in a language marked complete_menus. Not translated: status-bar messages and errors (they stay English, also for agents), names that are user data (layers, styles, documents), strings assembled with format! that were not converted to fmt/trn. Not done yet: right-to-left layout, locale-aware number and date formats, automatic language detection on the web build (native builds read LANG/LC_*, the macOS preferred languages and the Windows user locale).

Camera Raw has explicit coverage for all ten available languages, including Korean and Simplified Chinese. Its contextual cameraRaw entries distinguish tonal regions, colour-band names and font-weight Light. The title uses a {layer} placeholder; user layer names and the universal RGB/Lab channel symbols stay unchanged. Collapse IDs use English source keys, so switching languages preserves open sections. Mixer tabs wrap within the panel width. Catalog coverage and actual shell language-switch tests enforce these rules.

Native CJK font fallback follows the selected UI script and resets its cache when switching languages; font delivery on the web remains separate work.