About   |   Getting Started   |   Downloads   |   Documentation

Hot Door CORE License Agreement - Version 1.0 - January 27th, 2014

Hot Door CORE is Copyright 2012-2024 by Hot Door, Inc.

Hot Door CORE is written by Garrett Walbridge and Brendon Cheves.


The Adobe® Illustrator® SDK was used in the creation of Hot Door CORE.

Open SSL™ was used in the creation of Hot Door CORE

Boost C++ libraries were used in the creation of Hot Door CORE.

Portions of the Hot Door libraries that CORE is based on were written by Leif Lundberg.


Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person or organization obtaining a copy of the software and accompanying documentation covered by this license (the "Software") to build plug-ins using the Software subject to the following:

The plug-in about box, documentation, or license agreement must include the following acknowledgment: "This product was built using Hot Door CORE (http://hotdoorcore.com/)."

Plug-ins built using the Software may not be called "CORE" nor may "CORE" appear in their names without prior written permission.

The Software may not be redistributed in any form without prior written permission. Rather, the latest version should always be downloaded from http://hotdoorcore.com/.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY HOT DOOR, INC. "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. IN NO EVENT SHALL HOT DOOR, INC. OR ANY OF ITS EMPLOYEES OR SUBCONTRACTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING IN ANY WAY FROM THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE.


0.8.2 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.8.2 for macOS and Windows


0.8.1 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.8.1 for macOS and Windows


0.8.0 release changelog:

0.8.0 release notes:

Support for Illustrator 16 through 22 has been dropped - the difficulty in maintaining this many older versions was simply too high relative to the number of users on such versions, in combination with features in the later versions we were missing out on due to such prolonged backward compatibility.

All usage of the C++ std::auto_ptr class has been removed; std::unique_ptr is now used where appropriate and the vast majority of usages of raw pointers within e.g. std::vector containers has moved to std::shared_ptr. The end result here is much cleaner, more reliable, and more convenient memory management.

It is worth noting that on Mac we now have two options for creating plugins for Illustrator 25, based on changes Adobe made mid-stream in 25.3. If you link against the hdi_core static binary for 25.0, then your plugin will be compatible with all versions of Illustrator 25 on Mac but will be Intel only (i.e. it will only run on Apple Silicon Macs with Illustrator 25.3 under Rosetta 2 compatibility mode).

You can additionally/optionally link against the hdi_core static binary for 25.3, and your plugin will only be compatible with Illustrator 25.3 on Mac but will run natively on either Intel or Apple Silicon. It is not recommended to try running such a plugin binary in Illustrator 25.0-25.2 on an Intel Mac.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.8.0 for macOS and Windows


0.7.8 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.8 for macOS and Windows


0.7.7 release changelog:

0.7.7 release notes:

We are now publicly releasing our own internal tool for simpler resource management on both Mac and Windows, named hdi_rezzer, which handles this situation more gracefully. It is included with hdi_core as of version 0.7.7, and you can find examples of its use in the sample projects that also come with hdi_core.

At a high level, hdi_rezzer allows you to describe your PiPL, PNG, and SVG resources with JSON files. It will take a JSON file as input, and will generate Mac *.r, Windows *.rc, C/C++ *.h, Adobe IDToFile.txt, and plugin.pipl files as output. The Mac *.r and Windows *.rc files are of course for resource compilation, the C/C++ *.h file is to define all the names and ID numbers of your resources for use in your C/C++ source code, and the Adobe IDToFile.txt and plugin.pipl files are of course for compatibility with Illustrator.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.7 for macOS and Windows


0.7.6 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.6 for macOS and Windows


0.7.5 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.5 for macOS and Windows


0.7.4 release changelog:

0.7.4 release notes:

There are a variety of internal changes to CORE with this release, which require some minor project changes for all consumers of our library:
• On all platforms, ensure the compiler #defines HDI_CORE_AIP_MODE
• On all platforms, ensure the function void hdi::core::pluginLoaded() is defined. This is called when Illustrator first loads the plugin into memory - you do not have to do anything in this function, but your project will not link without it.
• On all platforms, replace any references to hdicorePiPL.r with hdicoreaipPiPL.r
• On Mac, ensure the Xcode project setting "Strip Style" is set to "Non-Global Symbols"
• For macOS Catalina (10.15) compatibility, you will need to notarize your plugin file. Please refer to Apple's documentation on how to do this.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.4 for macOS and Windows


0.7.3 release changelog:

0.7.3 release notes:

Due the fixes for macOS 10.14 in this release, we strongly recommended all consumers of the hdi_core library update to 0.7.3 as soon as possible. On Mac we also strongly recommend that all projects have the setting GCC_SYMBOLS_PRIVATE_EXTERN set to "Yes".

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.3 for macOS and Windows


0.7.2 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.2 for macOS and Windows


0.7.1 release changelog:

0.7.1 release notes:

Projects on Windows should require only very minor changes to work with the new VS 2015 requirements.

However, the following must be added to your Windows project configs:
• The toolset must be "Visual Studio 2015 - Windows XP" (v140_xp)
• The target platform version must be 8.1
• The following Windows libs must be linked against: uafxcw.lib, comctl32.lib, Comdlg32.lib, Winspool.lib, windowscodecs.lib, Gdiplus.lib, Wbemuuid.lib, Iphlpapi.lib, msimg32.lib, Wininet.lib, UxTheme.lib, Crypt32.lib

You can see examples of these configurations in any of the sample projects provided with hdi_core.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.1 for macOS and Windows


0.7.0 release changelog:

0.7.0 release notes:

Projects on Windows should require only very minor changes to work with the new MFC-based UI. Depending on your use cases, it is possible that none of the function signature changes will affect your code.

However, the following must be added to your Windows project configs:
• 32-bit Windows targets: A forced reference to only _PluginMain was required before, now an additional reference to _DllMain@12 is required too.
• 64-bit Windows targets: A forced reference to only PluginMain was required before, now an additional reference to DllMain is required too.

You can see examples of those symbol reference configurations in any of the sample projects provided with hdi_core.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.7.0 for macOS and Windows


0.6.3 release changelog:

0.6.3 release notes:

Important note regarding ADM support:

We have officially deprecated support for Illustrator CS3, CS4, and CS5 (13, 14, and 15). Please see the release notes for CORE 0.6.0 for details.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.6.3 for macOS and Windows


0.6.2 release changelog:

0.6.2 release notes:

Important note regarding ADM support:

We have officially deprecated support for Illustrator CS3, CS4, and CS5 (13, 14, and 15). Please see the release notes for CORE 0.6.0 for details.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.6.2 for macOS and Windows


0.6.1 release changelog:

0.6.1 release notes:

Important note regarding ADM support:

We have officially deprecated support for Illustrator CS3, CS4, and CS5 (13, 14, and 15). Please see the release notes for CORE 0.6.0 for details.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.6.1 for macOS and Windows


0.6.0 release changelog:

0.6.0 release notes:

Important note regarding ADM support:

Our testing with Illustrator CS3, CS4, and CS5 (Ai 13, 14, and 15) in OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) indicates that these older versions of Illustrator are beginning to become unstable. For example, on our test machines, the UI for CS3 does not fully load on occasion, CS4 receives several errors on launch regarding Photoshop import/export plugins, and CS5 crashes on quit most of the time.

Attempting to build a CS3, CS4, or CS5 plugin against our binaries with Xcode 7 is problematic as well (the linker gives an error regarding "compact unwinding", among others; linking can be achieved with the "-no_compact_unwind" option, but crashing at runtime has been observed). While the binaries themselves should continue to function, Xcode 7 cannot be used to develop for these versions of Illustrator (you will need Xcode 4, 5, or 6).

As such, we are officially deprecating support for these versions of Illustrator. As they are the versions of Illustrator still using ADM for plugin UI, we will cease further development of ADM-related features and only fix major bugs regarding these versions. When CORE reaches version 0.7.0 we will officially drop support for these versions of Illustrator and stop compiling our binaries for them.

Download Hot Door CORE 0.6.0 for macOS and Windows


0.5.9 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.9 for macOS and Windows


0.5.8 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.8 for macOS and Windows


0.5.7 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.7 for macOS and Windows


0.5.6 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.6 for macOS and Windows


0.5.5 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.5 for macOS and Windows


0.5.4 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.4 for macOS and Windows


0.5.3 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.3 for macOS and Windows


0.5.2 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.2 for macOS and Windows


0.5.1 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.1 for macOS and Windows


0.5.0 release changelog:

Download Hot Door CORE 0.5.0 for macOS and Windows