deckcraft/ROADMAP.md

SlideCraft roadmap

SlideCraft aims at full PowerPoint parity — and to be better: faster, open (a documented zip+JSON format plus PPTX), scriptable by agents (CLI, JSON control channel, MCP), and available everywhere (macOS, Windows, Linux, BSD and the web).

Status (2026-10-07)

Working today

• Document model: presentations, slides, masters and 11 standard layouts with placeholder inheritance (slide → layout → master → theme), sections, notes, comments, custom shows, header/footer fields, embedded media, unlimited undo built on shared slide snapshots.
• Themes: 8 original themes with colour and font schemes, custom colours/fonts, backgrounds, slide size presets.
• Shapes: ~150 preset geometries with adjustment handles, text boxes, pictures (with crop and adjustments), tables with styles, charts (column, bar, line, area, pie, doughnut, scatter and more), basic SmartArt, groups, connectors, ink, action buttons, WordArt.
• Text: in-place editing with caret, selection, keyboard and mouse; every Home-tab font and paragraph control; bullets and numbering; levels; autofit; columns; vertical text; fields; hyperlinks.
• Editing: select, marquee, move, resize, rotate, adjust; smart guides; nudge; duplicate; z-order; group/ungroup; align/distribute; Format Painter; Selection pane; clipboard incl. images.
• Transitions (fade, push, wipe, split, cover, uncover, zoom, morph…) and animations (entrance, emphasis, exit, motion paths, triggers, by-paragraph builds) on a shared timeline engine.
• Slide show: full screen, keyboard/mouse navigation, blank screens, go-to-slide, pen, presenter window, rehearse timings, custom shows, Set Up Show; Reading View.
• Views: Normal (thumbnails with sections, slide, notes), Outline, Slide Sorter, Notes Page, Slide Master; zoom; grayscale.
• Review: comments, accessibility checker, spelling.
• Audio and video: MP3, AAC/M4A, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio; H.264, HEVC, VP9 and AV1 video in MP4/MOV/WebM/MKV (pure-Rust decoders); poster frames, trim, fades, volume, loop, rewind, play across slides, hide during show, full screen; an in-place control bar in the editor and media.play/pause/stop/seek/info/posterFrame for agents. WMA/WMV are recognised and embedded but not yet playable.
• PDF export: slides, notes pages and handouts (1–9 per page) with a selectable real-text layer, hyperlinks and slide bookmarks (file.export {format: "pdf", layout}, File › Export…).
• UI: PowerPoint-style ribbon with contextual tabs, ~240 original icons, status bar, panes, command palette, light/dark.
• Automation: ~200 commands, every one reachable from slidecraft-cli, the app's JSON control channel and the MCP server (headless or connected to the running app).
• Web: apps/slidecraft-web runs the same UI in the browser (trunk; WebGPU with WebGL2 fallback), opening the sample deck; Open/Insert use the browser file picker, Save/Export download.
• Release CI: pushes to release build a draft GitHub Release (macOS universal dmg, Windows x64/x86 msi + zip, Linux AppImage/deb/rpm/tar.gz + Flatpak, FreeBSD tar.gz, web zip); signing secrets live in the release environment. Version: cargo xtask version.

In progress: PPTX import/export · first signed release run.

Next (in order): vector PDF artwork · WMA/WMV decoding · Format Shape pane depth · connectors with glue, freeform and edit points · merge shapes · Animation Pane polish · native macOS menu bar · print · Notes/Handout masters · equations · SVG pictures.

Milestone details live in plan/execution-plan.md (M0–M14, local planning notes).

How far from full parity (estimate, 2026-10-07)

Breadth: ~74% weighted (P0 core 88%, P1 67%, P2 33%) over the 187 features of the PowerPoint catalogue, scored row by row in docs/parity.md (cargo xtask parity recomputes it). Many features scored done still lack some of PowerPoint's options, dialogs or pixel fidelity, so overall parity including depth is about 55%.

Remaining work: about 230 wall-clock hours of a single Claude Opus 5.5 agent (±30%), or roughly 80–110 hours with four agents in parallel on separate crates:

Work	Estimate
Open P0 (16 partial, 1 missing: PPTX fidelity, vector PDF, media playback, Format Shape pane, presenter view…)	30 h
Open P1 (23 partial, 10 missing: connectors/glue, freeform, merge shapes, print, multi-monitor, SVG…)	45 h
Open P2 (11 partial, 28 missing: equations, video export, 3-D, remove background, thesaurus…)	40 h
Depth and pixel fidelity of every ribbon group, dialog and pane against PowerPoint	75 h
Performance (incremental rendering, GPU raster) and PPTX corpus hardening	30 h
Platform verification and release hardening (signing, Flatpak, BSD, web)	10 h

Basis: the M0 arc (model, renderer, text engine, engine with ~200 commands, ribbon UI, show engine, CLI and MCP) took roughly 25 wall-clock agent hours; open catalogue rows average 1–2 hours each.

Agents: CLI and MCP

Every command is reachable from slidecraft-cli (run, describe, commands, app for the running window, render, convert), from MCP (slidecraft-cli mcp, optionally --connect PORT), and from the app's JSON control channel (slidecraft --control PORT).