Contributing to Artefact

Thanks for helping! Bug reports, ideas and focused pull requests are all welcome.

Before you start

• Look through issues and Discussions first; for anything big, open an issue or a discussion so we can agree on the approach.
• Keep a pull request to one change, with a clear description and screenshots or a short video for anything visible.

Building

See Build from source. The app is in android/ (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose); the engine is in engine/ (Rust). Run cargo test -p artefact-mobile in engine/ after engine changes, and fix every warning (cargo clippy).

Design and code rules

Read these two before you change anything people see or anything in the engine:

• DESIGN.md: colour, typography, liquid glass, motion, haptics, layout and the screen patterns to reuse.
• CODE.md: how the app and the engine are laid out, the hard rules, and how to add a tool, a file type, a setting or a note kind.

The short version:

• Typography. All interface text is Plus Jakarta Sans through ClearType (Headline, Title, Body, Label, Caption …). No raw fontSize on a Text, and no new typefaces.
• Colour. Accents come from Candy (Candy.Sky is the action colour, Candy.Tomato is for deleting); surfaces use clear.ink* and the card tones. No hex colours in screens. Check light and dark themes.
• Liquid glass. Floating chrome is built from the glass components in ui/glass/ (GlassCircle, GlassPill, glassBar(), GlassMenu, GlassDialog …) over a layerBackdrop. They read the user's Settings ▸ Liquid glass & motion (frost, lens, tint, adaptive luminance), so never fake glass with a translucent colour or hard-code a GlassStyle.
• Motion and haptics. Use the named springs (GlassMotion, Fluid) and Feels, so the user's motion settings apply. Sliders tick; menus unfold beside their button.
• Words. Every string is in res/values/strings.xml and in every values-xx translation. The UiTextTest unit test fails on English written in Kotlin.
• Offline. No internet permission, ever. CI checks the built APK.
• No duplicate tools. If an existing tool already does it (PDF to text is in Export, text to PDF in Create PDF), add it there instead of a new tile.
• Match the code around your change: naming, comment density and idiom.
• Every third-party asset or library is credited in ATTRIBUTION.toml / ATTRIBUTION.md and the app's licences page.

Licence

By contributing you agree that your contribution is licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0, like the rest of the project.