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Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

would love an AE and InDesign clone, theres just nothing as good as either

Another GitHub has some after effect clone as well. Along with a near complete Adobe suite clone.

Where that's good, I don't know..nobody seems to care telling.

If you're talking about the artcraft stuff, it's strange. The codebase goes back to 2016 as a monorepo but not the full suite and was recently split out as separate apps and other parts of the Adobe suite added. The CLAUDE.md [1] are... interesting and left me puzzling about it. I was mostly interested in the pdfcraft (have been appreciating https://www.nobloatpdf.com/)

> Clean-room.

> * Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Acrobat bundle (names and listings only). Never open Contents/Resources/JavaScripts/.

> * Behaviour comes from public docs, specs (ISO 32000-2, the Arlington model) and black-box observation (plan/acrobat/).

> * Never copy GPL/AGPL code. MuPDF, Ghostscript, Poppler, veraPDF and DSS run only as external oracle processes.

> * See plan/README.md §Clean-room and plan/adr/0001.

It really looks like they have AI running Adobe (and other apps) as sources of truth and have rules against disassembly or including source from GPL projects which left me pondering the ethics of it.

[0] https://getartcraft.com/

[1] https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

That's the one I was referring to as you asked about an alternative to AdobeAE.

I only came across it recently as it's trending. I had no idea they had already started developing adobe apps clones for so many years

Yep, their work used to be in a mono repo. That's still up there. They have a reference to how to find it. I didn't read all the history but it does date back to 2016. Seems like it was mostly a web app and not open source until recently is the vibe I was getting from it.

perhaps my requirements aren’t that complex but i find Affinity mostly a great replacement for InDesign. there are some annoyances and unintuitive limitations but its all workable.

ae with more stability and error handling would be a treat

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