wordcraft

WordCraft

Writing and document design; an open-source, modern word processor, built in pure Rust.

A fast, open-source word processor with a familiar workflow: the ribbon, styles, tables, track changes, references and mail merge. It reads and writes .docx, runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and BSD, and in the browser via WebAssembly. By the ArtCraft team.

WordCraft on getartcraft.com · ArtCraft · All Crafting Apps

The Open Studio Handbook , WordCraft's built-in sample: the ribbon, live Styles gallery, rulers and the Navigation pane.

ArtCraft is a community of artists from all walks of life. Painters, photographers, filmmakers, illustrators, designers, animators, hobbyists, and people who picked up a pencil last week. If you make things, you're one of us. Come say hi on Discord.

A tour · Why WordCraft · What works today · Quick start · For agents · Architecture · Roadmap · Downloads · The Crafting Apps · License and credits

A tour

Every screenshot below is WordCraft itself, rendered offscreen by its own UI test harness (cargo run -p wordcraft-ui-egui --example ui_shot).

Review. Track changes, comment balloons in the margin, accept and reject, spelling and grammar as you type.

References. Tables of contents, footnotes, citations in APA, MLA, Chicago or IEEE, index and captions.

Design. Themes, style sets, paragraph spacing, watermarks, page colour and borders.

Dark mode with formatting marks, and the Insert tab: tables, pictures, shapes, links, headers, footers, fields and symbols.

Layout. Drop caps, text wrapping around pictures and shapes, automatic hyphenation, line numbers and page borders.

File. Start from a template, open recent documents, edit properties, export to PDF and other formats.

Why WordCraft

Familiar. Ribbon tabs, groups, shortcuts and behaviour: Enter continues a list,

Tab demotes it, Ctrl/⌘+B bolds the word under the caret, the Styles gallery previews styles live, F4 repeats, F7 checks spelling, F8 extends the selection.

Your files. Opens and saves .docx (OOXML), and also .odt, .rtf, .html, .md, .tex (LaTeX), .txt; opens legacy 97-2003 .doc; exports PDF

with real, selectable text, links and bookmarks.

Fast. Paragraph layout is cached, so typing in a 188-page document re-lays it out in about

1.4 ms; pages render on demand.

Everywhere. One Rust codebase for macOS, Windows, Linux, BSD and the web. No Electron, no

Tauri: native egui on the GPU.

Built for agents. Every action is a command with an id. The same 422 commands drive the

ribbon, keyboard shortcuts, the command search, a command-line tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server.

Private. Spelling, grammar and everything else work offline.

Open. MIT OR Apache-2.0. Clean-room: built from public specifications and observation, with

every asset original or openly licensed.

What works today

The honest picture, area by area, is in ROADMAP.md, the parity assessment and the generated feature checklist.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft
cd wordcraft
cargo run --release -p wordcraft -- --sample        # the desktop app with the sample document
cargo run --release -p wordcraft -- report.docx     # open a document

The interface translations and the spelling and hyphenation data come from craft-i18n, an optional build input. To build with them, check it out at the commit in craft-i18n.rev and point CRAFT_I18N_DIR at it (an absolute path); without it WordCraft builds with an English interface, English spelling falls back to an installed Hunspell English or craft-proof's built-in word list, and only Bulgarian, Turkish and Russian hyphenate (by rule):

git clone https://github.com/storytold/craft-i18n ../craft-i18n
git -C ../craft-i18n checkout "$(cat craft-i18n.rev)"
CRAFT_I18N_DIR="$PWD/../craft-i18n" cargo run --release -p wordcraft -- --sample

Command line:

wordcraft-cli convert report.docx report.pdf        # docx, pdf, odt, rtf, html, md, tex, txt, png
wordcraft-cli text report.docx                      # plain text
wordcraft-cli inspect report.docx                   # structure as JSON
wordcraft-cli run --template sample \
  --cmd 'select.text={"text":"Membership"}' --cmd format.bold --save out.docx
wordcraft-cli run --script job.json                 # the same from a file: commands, then save to docx and pdf

Web: cd apps/wordcraft-web && trunk serve, then open .

For agents: CLI and MCP

WordCraft was designed to be driven by people and by AI agents.

claude mcp add wordcraft -- wordcraft-cli mcp                  # headless documents
# confine the agent to folders: wordcraft-cli mcp --automation-read-root DIR --automation-write-root DIR
wordcraft --control 7981 &                                     # or drive the running app…
claude mcp add wordcraft-app -- wordcraft-cli mcp --connect 127.0.0.1:7981

Tools include list_commands, execute, batch, type_text, select_text, inspect_document, render_page, save_document, and, with a running app, screenshot, click and key. Agents can check their work through inspect_document without screenshots. See docs/mcp.md and the control protocol. Macros record any sequence of commands and play it back (tools.recordMacro, tools.macros).

Logs

The desktop app writes its log records to standard error and to logs/wordcraft.log next to its preferences: on Linux $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/wordcraft/logs/ (by default ~/.config/wordcraft/logs/), on macOS ~/Library/Application Support/WordCraft/logs/, on Windows %APPDATA%\WordCraft\logs\. A start from a desktop menu or the Dock has no terminal, so this file is what to attach to a bug report: unreadable parts of a .docx, pictures or fonts a PDF export had to leave out and panics the command guard recovered from land there. Each launch moves the previous log to wordcraft.1.log (and that one to wordcraft.2.log), so the log of a run that crashed survives the next start; a log stops growing at 16 MiB. --version writes no file, and runs with WORDCRAFT_NO_PREFS (agents' test runs) log to standard error only. Document text is never logged; a panic message leaves out the text it quotes.

By default WordCraft's own crates log at info and everything else at warn. RUST_LOG replaces that with env_logger-style directives, for example RUST_LOG=debug, RUST_LOG=warn,wordcraft_docx=trace or RUST_LOG=info,wgpu_core=warn; a directive ending in covers every target starting with it (wordcraft=debug). The logger is apps/wordcraft/src/logging.rs.

Architecture

cargo xtask ci runs formatting, clippy, ~800 tests, the asset-attribution check, the layering check and the wasm build. Contributor and agent instructions: AGENTS.md.

Roadmap

WordCraft is in alpha. It has commands for 97% of the ribbon and menu features in its feature catalog (docs/parity-checklist.md) today; counting depth, file fidelity, stability and the rest, we estimate it is about 60% ready for real work, about 55% for a typical professional's weekly work and about 63% for everyday essentials. Beta needs testing against real-world .docx files, keeping charts and SmartArt through a round trip, closer pagination fidelity, a stability sweep and native printing. Details and estimates: ROADMAP.md and where we fall short.

Downloads

Download WordCraft from GitHub: the latest release has every build listed below, and all releases has earlier versions and their notes. in the file names is the version number, and SHA256SUMS.txt lists a checksum for every file.

Windows

The installer is one dual-scope package. By default it installs for your account only, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\ArtCraft\WordCraft, and needs no administrator rights; choosing "Everyone on this computer" on the first page installs into C:\Program Files\ArtCraft\WordCraft (Program Files (x86) for the 32-bit build) and asks for an administrator. Install only one copy: a copy for another scope is refused, so uninstall first to change who WordCraft is installed for. Installers and executables are code-signed.

If the app doesn't open on Windows: the desktop app initializes only DirectX 12 by default. Letting wgpu also create an OpenGL instance can crash some graphics drivers (AMD's atio6axx.dll) before the window appears, so the app would flash in Task Manager and quit. WGPU_BACKEND overrides the default for troubleshooting (for example dx12 or vulkan). In PowerShell, from the folder containing the executable:

$env:WGPU_BACKEND = "vulkan"
& .\wordcraft.exe
Remove-Item Env:WGPU_BACKEND                     # restore the default for later launches

An explicit gl override can bring the driver crash back on affected systems. The macOS, Linux and web backend defaults are unchanged.

The 32-bit build uses OpenGL even when a DirectX 12 graphics card is present. On 32-bit Windows, creating a DirectX 12 graphics pipeline fails immediately and the app exits before the window appears. WGPU_BACKEND=vulkan (or dx12) still overrides that.

If the app quits right after its window appears with "Parent device is lost" in the log: WordCraft compiles DirectX 12 shaders with FXC, the compiler built into Windows, so it needs no dxcompiler.dll/dxil.dll and ignores any copy another program put on PATH (#603). WGPU_DX12_COMPILER (fxc, dxc, auto) overrides this; with dxc, a matching dxcompiler.dll and dxil.dll must sit next to wordcraft.exe. WGPU_BACKEND = "vulkan" also avoids DirectX 12 altogether.

If the app is slow on an older Windows PC: when DirectX 12 finds no graphics card with a driver for it (for example Intel 4th-generation graphics on Windows 11), it only offers the built-in software renderer, which draws every frame on the processor. WordCraft normally uses OpenGL instead, without setting anything. If OpenGL has no usable adapter, it can use DirectX 12's WARP software adapter. The log file records the choice (lines starting with graphics:). WGPU_BACKEND still overrides it, e.g. $env:WGPU_BACKEND = "gl" or "dx12".

macOS

Linux

RISC-V (riscv64): wordcraft- -linux-riscv64.tar.gz, a tarball cross-compiled for glibc 2.39+ (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13 and newer).

Read Aloud (Review › Read Aloud) speaks through a speech program installed on the system: it tries espeak-ng, then espeak, and when neither is installed it talks to Speech Dispatcher. The .rpm package recommends espeak-ng; the .deb recommends espeak-ng or speech-dispatcher, so the package manager installs one of the two by default. With the AppImage or the tarball, install one yourself if neither is there (sudo apt install espeak-ng, sudo dnf install espeak-ng, sudo pacman -S espeak-ng). The Flatpak doesn't speak yet: it has no audio access and doesn't include espeak-ng, espeak or Speech Dispatcher.

Wayland: on a Wayland desktop the app runs through XWayland when it is available, because winit (the windowing library) supports dragging files into the window only on X11. To use the native Wayland backend instead (for example for sharper text with fractional scaling, at the cost of file drag-and-drop), choose File › Options › Advanced › Linux display server › Wayland; it applies the next time WordCraft starts, and X11 (XWayland) or Automatic switches back. The WORDCRAFT_WAYLAND environment variable overrides the setting: 1 for native Wayland, 0 for XWayland:

WORDCRAFT_WAYLAND=1 wordcraft

Arch Linux (AUR). Community members maintain three AUR packages; the project doesn't publish to the AUR itself. Install one of them:

For example yay -S wordcraft-bin or paru -S wordcraft-bin.

Community packages

These packages are maintained by community members, not by the WordCraft team.

On Gentoo, the ::snakebyte overlay packages the Linux release as app-office/wordcraft-bin (prebuilt) and app-office/wordcraft (built from source):

eselect repository add snakebyte git https://github.com/switch87/snakebyte-overlay.git
emaint sync -r snakebyte
echo 'app-office/wordcraft-bin ~amd64' >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/wordcraft
emerge --ask app-office/wordcraft-bin

FreeBSD

Web (WebAssembly)

The Crafting Apps

WordCraft is one of the Crafting Apps: free, open-source creative tools from the ArtCraft team, each written from scratch in Rust and each able to stand on its own.

And ArtCraft itself, our AI image and video studio for artists who want real control.

Come make things with us

Our Discord is where artists of every kind hang out: people who paint, shoot, draw, cut film, set type, and people still figuring out what they like to make. Share what you're working on, ask for help, tell us what's broken, or tell us what you wish these tools could do. Whatever your medium and however long you've been at it, you're welcome here.

discord.gg/artcraft · getartcraft.com · The Crafting Apps · WordCraft

License and credits

WordCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. Copyright (c) 2026 ArtCraft Team and the WordCraft contributors. Required notices are in NOTICE.

Bundled fonts, icons, images and other assets keep their own open licenses; each one is listed with its author, source and license in ATTRIBUTION.md.

The English spelling dictionary and hyphenation come from Grady Ward's public-domain Moby Hyphenator II word list. Polish spelling reads the Hunspell pl_PL dictionary installed on the system (not bundled), as do Russian, Portuguese, Czech, Italian, Croatian and Turkish spelling (how to install them: docs/spelling-dictionaries.md), and Polish hyphenation the TeX patterns by Hanna Kołodziejska, Bogusław Jackowski and Marek Ryćko (MIT option). The sample documents and templates are original text written for WordCraft.

The ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos in docs/brand/ are trademarks of the ArtCraft Team and are not covered by this license. They may be used only unmodified, and only as part of this repository and WordCraft, under docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt. Forks and modified versions must remove them.

Made by the ArtCraft team and community.