| Design file |
A *.design file. One UTF-8 JSON object holding one design document. |
| Assets folder |
The folder <name>.design.assets/ next to the design file. It holds image and font files named by content hash (section 8). |
| Document |
The design as a whole: metadata, pages, nodes, styles, variables, libraries, flows, comments, versions. |
| Tree |
The tree member: the document as it was at the last consolidation (section 4). |
| WAL |
Write-append list: the wal member, the events made since the last consolidation (section 5). |
| Event |
One entry of the WAL: one change, made by one actor at one moment. |
| Envelope |
The members every event has: seq, at, by, op, and optionally group and note (section 5.1). |
| Tree hash |
sha256:<hex>: the SHA-256 of the canonical JSON of a folded tree. It names a state of the document (section 6.9). |
| Epoch |
The ep- id a consolidation gives the tree it writes; the wal.base marker carries it (section 5.4). |
| Operation (op) |
The kind of change an event makes, for example node.update (section 5.11). |
| Payload |
The members of an event besides the envelope. |
| Actor |
The person or tool that made a change; its display name is the event’s by (section 5.8). |
| Group |
Consecutive events made by one transaction: one undo step, one history entry (section 5.7). |
| Fold |
Apply events to a state, in file order, to compute the current document (section 6.1). |
| Coalescing |
Merging a new event into the previous unsaved event when both belong to one continuous edit (section 6.2). |
| Consolidation |
Folding the whole WAL into the tree and emptying the WAL (section 7). |
| Node |
One layer: a frame, a shape, a text, an instance, and so on. Pages are not nodes (section 4.2). |
| Node map |
tree.nodes: every node of every page, keyed by id, flat (section 4.3). |
| Parent |
The node or page a node belongs to, named by its parent member. |
| Fractional index |
The index string that orders a node among its siblings (section 4.3). |
| Stored property |
A property written in the file. |
| Derived value |
A value the core computes and never writes: auto layout positions, hug sizes, group bounds, text lines, instance sublayers (section 4.5). |
| Default |
The value of a property that is not written. Writers leave out properties that equal their default. |
| Merge patch |
A partial object applied to a stored object as in RFC 7396: members are set, null removes, nested objects merge, arrays are replaced (section 5.9). |
| Binding |
A reference from a property to a variable, in boundVariables (section 4.10). |
| Main component |
A COMPONENT node. Instances show a copy of it. |
| Instance sublayer |
A layer inside an instance. It is derived from the main component; it has a derived id and is not stored (section 4.8). |
| Override path |
The ids from an instance down to one of its sublayers, joined by / (section 4.8). |
| Library |
Another .design file whose components, styles and variables this file uses (section 4.11). |
| Asset |
An image or font file in the assets folder, named sha256-<hex>.<ext> (section 8). |
| Conflict |
Two events from two merged branches that set the same property of the same object (section 6.4). |
| Orphan |
A node whose parent no longer exists (section 6.5). |
| Reader, writer |
A program that reads or writes design files: the extension, ud, an agent, a script. |