Sketch icon deconfusion : // vs =

[freman]

here are slightly more balanced renderings. My final version. I'm happy with the result, I think this will stop me making mistakes and is well integrated with the existing look and feel. Comments were helpful in finding a far better aesthetic than my original idea.

Hopefully this will be a useful solution for others but I have to limit how much time I spend twiddling details. I'm still recovering from years of OCD

i don't plan to invest any more effort in this for now.

Moi, non plus. Enjoy.

[triplus]

Sure, why not. Wait for some feedback, and if other people will like it, or better, won't object, make a PR after. I personally wouldn't like the first proposals you made, latter ones, on the other hand, are much more acceptable proposals. That block icon could use some transparency too, if that wouldn't represent too much of a stretch for you.

P.S. Before making a PR, don't forget to update the xpm ones.

[chrisb]

The different lengths for parallel are highly appreciated. Alas, the change of the equality icon is not at all. The equal sign is universal world wide. And you can even interpret it as two lines of equal length.

There are three symbols directly understandable: vertical, horizontal, and equality. I really see no benfit in changing one of these to something which needs further explanation.
So please, you can make it slightly smaller, but don't change it to a state where it cannot be recognized as equality. As time goes by you may get accustomed to the keyboard shortcuts, and you will no longer mix these constraints.

[freman]

Thanks Chris. I'm really not going to spend any more time on this. I have a solution which is clean and unambiguous which I will drop into any future builds I do. I shared the results since I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets tripped up by this but I'm not going to campaign for this to be adopted or spend any longer discussing pros and cons.

I'm going spend any time I have for FC on more important things. There are plenty of bugs in path which are more important than this.

If anyone wants to adopt there icons or integrate one or both into FC I release the designs under LGPL.

[Joel_graff]

The different lengths for parallel are highly appreciated. Alas, the change of the equality icon is not at all. The equal sign is universal world wide. And you can even interpret it as two lines of equal length.

I had the exact same thought. I was frequently mixing the two constraints as I was learning sketcher. Having the shorter line in the parallel icon provides just the right visual cue that it's not the equality constraint. No need to change the equality icon whatsoever.

That said, really glad to see someone decided to post on this - and to see (what I think) is a really effective solution.

[wmayer]

I was checking this PR https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/2536 and I share triplus' opinion that the new icon is not the correct symbol for parallelism and I share DeepSOIC's opinion that it's rather unusual that you mistakenly use the parallelism icon for equality but it happens more often that the equality icon is used for parallelism. But nevertheless it would be good to make them more easily distinguishable.

Now the = symbol usually is used to express that two mathematical quantities are equal. However, in the sketcher case we define (or better force) two quantities to be equal and therefore we could also use this symbol :=
And with this symbol it shouldn't happen any more to mix it up with parallelism.

Opinions?

[DeepSOIC]

https://math.stackexchange.com/question ... -does-mean
":=" has striking assymetry between lhs and rhs, but the equality constraint does not have that inherent assymetry.
Some other symbols that I don't know exact meaning of:
≐ ≑ ≒ ≓ ≖ ≗ ≘ ≙ ≚ ≛ ≜
I particularly like the second one

I have no more opinions than what I've already posted.

[wmayer]

Look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... al_symbols and search for := (it's in the section Symbols based on equality). And WP describes it as follows:

x := y, y =: x or x ≡ y means x is defined to be another name for y, under certain assumptions taken in context.

Now when we set a length constraint to a line, apply the equality constraint to another line then this line adjusts its length as soon as we change the length constraint of the first line. So, IMO the := symbol wouldn't be wrong in this context.

[freman]

:= is the assignment operator in Pascal , often read as "becomes equal to" , that fits but is too obscure. Icons require obvious interpretation, not a WP article or google search.

Since what FC advertises is applying "constraints", I think it needs focus a condition of equality rather than an assignment of a value.

IMO my doubling of the length icon, which visually echoes the equals sign, says "equal length" quite nicely, though I can live with the old = icon now I have my avatar symbol for parallel and this prevents me from messing up all the time.

[chrisb]

To me := has a direction, while = is rather the mathematical equality. Whichever of the two lines changes length due to some other constrants - the other is changed as well.