brushkit

Read Photoshop and Procreate brush files in Rust and draw their tip shapes.

Give brushkit the bytes of an .abr, .brush or .brushset file and you get back every brush's name and a grayscale picture of its tip. That is enough to show a brush pack as a grid of thumbnails or to list what a pack contains. brushkit only reads. It never writes or converts a brush file.

Install

[dependencies]
brushkit = "0.4"

brushkit re-exports brushkit-abr as brushkit::abr and brushkit-preview as brushkit::preview. If you need only one of them, depend on that crate instead. The API reference is on docs.rs.

Example

This program lists the brushes in a Photoshop pack and the size of each preview:

use brushkit::abr::parse_abr_deferred_without_patterns;
use brushkit::preview::{preview_abr, PreviewOptions, TipPreview};

fn main() {
    let bytes = std::fs::read("pack.abr").unwrap();

    let pack = parse_abr_deferred_without_patterns(&bytes).unwrap().pack;
    println!(
        "{:?}: {} sampled brushes, {} computed presets",
        pack.version,
        pack.brushes.len(),
        pack.computed_presets.len()
    );

    let set = preview_abr(&bytes, PreviewOptions { max_cell: 128 }).unwrap();
    for entry in &set.entries {
        match &entry.tip {
            TipPreview::Available(bitmap) => {
                println!("{}: {}x{}", entry.name, bitmap.width, bitmap.height)
            }
            TipPreview::Unavailable(reason) => println!("{}: {reason:?}", entry.name),
        }
    }
}

To run it on your own file, put the file at pack.abr in the repository root and run cargo run -p brushkit --example readme.

Supported files

• Photoshop .abr, versions 1, 2, 6, 7, 9 and 10. You get brush names, sampled tips, computed tips, the full brush descriptor and embedded patterns. A sampled tip is a bitmap stored in the file (8 or 16 bit, raw, RLE or zlib). A computed tip has no bitmap. The file describes it with a diameter and, optionally, hardness, angle and roundness. brushkit draws the tip when the diameter is at least 1 pixel and uses defaults for any of the other three that are missing. Version 1 files store no brush names.
• Procreate .brush. You get the brush name from Brush.archive and its tip from Shape.png.
• Procreate .brushset. You get the set name, the brush order from brushset.plist, and the name and tip of each brush. A set without brushset.plist is read in zip order and has no name.

Previews

preview_abr, preview_brush and preview_brushset return one entry per brush, in file order. Every brush is in the list, including one whose tip cannot be drawn. That entry carries the reason instead of a bitmap, so a grid of thumbnails has no gaps. The reasons are NoShapePng, UnsupportedTipKind, Corrupt, TooLarge and OverBudget.

max_cell sets the largest side of a preview in pixels, and it must be at least 1. A larger tip is scaled down, and a smaller tip keeps its size. Each entry also has source_dimensions, the size of the original tip when the file stores one.

To draw only the first few thumbnails, use preview_abr_first_available, preview_brush_first_available or preview_brushset_first_available. They return the first n drawable tips and stop there. Each entry keeps its index from the full list, so the numbers can skip.

generate_preview_png turns one tip into a PNG of at most 200 pixels per side, with black ink and the tip's gray value as alpha. generate_contact_sheet_png draws many tips on one labeled sheet.

Reading an .abr pack

brushkit::abr has four parse functions. They differ in how much they decode before they return:

A deferred parse returns a DeferredPack, and DeferredPack::decode_tip(i) decodes one tip when you need it. The pack borrows the input bytes, so keep them alive while you use it. A pack's pattern block can be hundreds of megabytes, so skip patterns when you only need tips.

Features

• text (on by default) enables contact sheets. It pulls in ab_glyph and an embedded copy of the Inter Regular font for the labels.
• serde adds Serialize to the raw descriptor dump in brushkit_abr::dump.

Every crate builds for wasm32-unknown-unknown, because the readers take a &[u8] and touch neither the filesystem nor threads.

Untrusted files

brushkit expects files from untrusted sources. It checks every size, count and dimension it reads against a limit before it allocates memory. A malformed file gives an error or an unavailable entry, not a panic. One preview call returns at most MAX_PREVIEW_BYTES (256 MiB) of bitmaps, and the tips after that point come back as OverBudget.

Four fuzz targets under fuzz/ cover both readers. CI replays their seed files and fuzzes each target for 30 seconds on every pull request and every push to main.

Development

cargo build
cargo test
cargo +nightly fuzz run abr_parse   # needs cargo-fuzz

fuzz/README.md lists the other fuzz targets and explains how to regenerate the seeds.

Real brush packs are copyrighted, so the repository has none. Tests that check real files read the directory in BRUSHKIT_CORPUS_DIR and are skipped when it is not set. Synthetic files in the unit tests and the fuzz seeds cover the parsing itself. brushkit-fixture builds the synthetic descriptor bytes for the brushkit-abr tests.

The usage example above is also crates/brushkit/examples/readme.rs, and a test fails if the two differ.

Versions

brushkit is at 0.x, so a minor release can change the API. Pin the minor version, as in the install snippet above. Each release has a vX.Y.Z tag.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The Inter font used by the text feature is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, see crates/preview/assets/fonts/OFL.txt.