ArchCompose

A local-first desktop studio for architectural post-production, drawing sets and presentation boards.

Overview

ArchCompose brings the three things an architecture student or small office prepares for a review into one desktop app: composed renders, the drawing set, and the presentation boards they end up on. Projects are plain files on your disk; nothing is uploaded anywhere.

The app is built with Tauri 2, React and TypeScript, with a Rust backend for file access and image processing. Every edit is a pure function over the document model, which keeps undo, redo and testing simple. Rendering, export, PSD files and adjustments use library crates of the open-source PhotoCraft image engine behind ArchCompose's own interface.

ArchCompose is early: a working foundation, not a finished tool. Features that are not available yet are listed in the app as such, never as buttons that do nothing.

Features

Compose. Import a render, place cut-outs of people, trees and objects as layers, move and scale them on the canvas, set opacity, order, visibility and locks, and place a horizon guide at eye level. Adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, vibrance and warmth, and apply blur and sharpening per layer without touching the image file.

Export. Render a compose view at full resolution as PNG with transparency (16-bit when a source is 16-bit) or as a layered PSD, in the desktop app.

Image formats. PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP and SVG everywhere; in the desktop app also TIFF, PSD and PSB (composite image), OpenEXR, Radiance HDR, TGA and QOI, converted to sRGB from their colour profiles.

Drawings. Keep the drawing set: plans, sections, elevations, site plans and details, each with a sheet number (A-101, A-201 …), scale, level and a revision log. Every drawing is a paper sheet (A0 to A4 or custom, portrait or landscape) with a grid, snapping and rulers. Draw on a blank sheet or annotate an imported plan with pen, eraser, line, rectangle, circle, polyline and text, then select, move and scale what you drew. Paper size, drawing scale and image resolution stay separate: content is drawn in paper millimetres, the scale reports real lengths, and an underlay image's resolution sets its printed size.

Boards. Lay out presentation sheets in ISO A0 to A4 or custom sizes on a layout grid with margins and gutters. Frames hold images, drawings and text. A submission check reports effective print resolution, missing files, and empty or overlapping frames.

Safe project files. Projects save as .archcompose (JSON) with atomic writes. Reopened projects reload images from disk and mark missing ones. Your image files are never modified.

Precise canvas. Zoom at the pointer, fit and actual size, pan with the hand tool, Space or the middle button, rulers in pixels or millimetres, and a live cursor readout.

Undo everything. Every edit is a named undo step. Keyboard shortcuts cover all main actions (press ? in the app). Drop image files on the window to import them.

Screenshots

Drawings. Paper sheets with scale, grid and drawing tools to draw or annotate.	Boards. Grid-based sheet layout with a print resolution check.

Project status

Works today

• Compose, Drawings and Boards workspaces as described above.
• New, open, save and save as, with atomic saves and missing-file handling.
• Undo and redo for every edit, keyboard shortcuts, drag-and-drop import.
• Canvas preview through the system web view.
• Desktop app, with the PhotoCraft crates: full-resolution PNG and layered PSD export, import of TIFF, PSD/PSB composites, OpenEXR, HDR, TGA and QOI, and per-layer exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, vibrance, warmth, Gaussian blur and unsharp-mask sharpening previewed by the engine.

Planned with the PhotoCraft engine

Not implemented yet; see docs/UPSTREAM.md.

• Layer masks and selections (rectangle, ellipse, lasso).
• Brush and eraser on image layers.
• Exporting drawing sheets at a chosen resolution with the engine's vector renderer.
• Importing the individual layers of a PSD (today its composite image is imported).
• Contact and directional shadows, segmentation.

Planned in ArchCompose itself

• Perspective calibration and scale-aware placement.
• PDF and vector drawing import, revision comparison.
• True-scale placement of drawings on boards and print-ready PDF export.

The canvas is a preview drawn by the system web view; exports are rendered by the engine. The browser build (npm run dev) has no engine and shows engine features as unavailable. The order of this work is in docs/ROADMAP.md; the app's own list of available and planned features lives in src/engine/capabilities.ts.

Quick start

Requirements: Node.js 22 or newer, Rust 1.95 or newer, Git (Cargo fetches the pinned PhotoCraft crates), and on Windows the WebView2 runtime (preinstalled on Windows 11).

On Windows, Rust needs a linker. Either install the Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload (MSVC, recommended), or use the GNU toolchain (rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu) with a MinGW-w64 distribution such as WinLibs on PATH.

git clone https://github.com/Luis-0508/ArchCompose.git

cd ArchCompose && npm ci && npm run tauri dev

The frontend also runs in a browser for quick iteration (npm run dev, then open http://localhost:1420). File dialogs fall back to browser file inputs there, and images cannot be reloaded after reopening a project, because browsers do not expose file paths.

Development

npm run check runs formatting, linting, type checking and unit tests:

npm run check

npm run build

Playwright needs its browser once (npx playwright install chromium), then:

npx playwright test

Rust checks:

cd src-tauri && cargo fmt --all --check && cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings && cargo test --workspace

The desktop smoke test drives the real app through WebView2's DevTools port and exercises the Rust commands and disk I/O. Start the app with remote debugging enabled (PowerShell):

$env:WEBVIEW2_ADDITIONAL_BROWSER_ARGUMENTS = "--remote-debugging-port=9222"; npm run tauri dev

npm run smoke:desktop

To regenerate the WebP screenshots in docs/screenshots, run the Playwright screenshot spec with SCREENSHOTS=1 set in the environment.

To build an installer:

npm run tauri build

Architecture

src/
  model/        Pure document model: types, update functions, history, validation
  state/        Application store and runtime asset cache
  app/          Shell, commands and keyboard shortcuts
  workspaces/   Compose, Drawings and Boards
  ui/           Design system components
  viewport/     Camera math and the shared zoom/pan viewport
  platform/     Desktop (Tauri) and browser adapters
  engine/       Engine boundary: capabilities, preview formats, composition spec
src-tauri/
  src/          Window setup and IPC command wiring
  core/         Tauri-free, unit-tested backend logic (file I/O, engine adapter)
e2e/            Playwright tests against the browser build

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: modules, rules and decisions
• docs/UPSTREAM.md: the PhotoCraft crates ArchCompose uses, and how
• docs/ROADMAP.md: milestones
• docs/GITHUB.md: GitHub repository settings and automation
• AGENTS.md: conventions for contributors and coding agents

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request.

Issues, pull requests, commit messages, documentation, filenames, and repository-facing technical text are written in English so contributors can collaborate consistently.

Security

Please do not report security-sensitive issues publicly. See SECURITY.md.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only (AGPL-3.0-only). See LICENSE.

ArchCompose includes third-party components under their own licences, among them crates of PhotoCraft (MIT OR Apache-2.0, used under MIT). See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md. ArchCompose is not affiliated with PhotoCraft or the ArtCraft Team.