Visual Aids

Beside the usual visual feedback of the mouse cursor, different tools will employ visual aids to enhance the use of that tool. Different tools will use different visual aids as appropriate. Entity Creation Tools, typically use all of the visual aids.

Preview Entities

Entity Creation tools incorporate a preview entity and one or more entity design widgets. The preview entity shows what an entity would look like if you were to complete the current process with the current choices. Thus, a line preview entity would show you what the line would look like if you were to click it. The preview entities are shown with dotted lines.

ssVisualAidPreviewEntity

Cursor Icons

There are various cursor icons to give user a visual feedback of currently active tool. The cursor icon changes whenever active tool is changed. Apart from active tool cursor icons, there is also invalid input cursor icon . Whenever the input under cursor becomes invalid the cursor icon changes to invalid input cursor .

Cursor Targets

This is a very common visual aid. There are two types of cursor target representation.

•	Round cursor target ()

•

Square cursor target (

)
Round target cursor(

) is shown whenever user moves the mouse around before selecting any point. Square target cursor (

) is drawn whenever user selects some point during any tool step. In example below drawing arc with Start-Middle-End Arc Tool, start and middle points are already selected and are shown with square target

. The end point is still not selected and hence is shown as round target

ssVisualAidCursorUpdate