Quick tests with some colors…
Text might be easier to read if the highlight was a simple box, just like when you select and highlight text in this post. Complex shade shape makes it more difficult to read.
I also have this opinion, I liked the last results pointed by @eelik and the text elements became quite difficult to read when selected.
5.99.0-unknown-9dac853~86~ubuntu16.04.1, release build
An alternative might be to decrease the “size” of the halo. (might be a second setting.)
I made a few quick experiments in inkscape:
inkscape source
Conclusion: Halo looks ok with the right combinations of colour and size. (I personally still prefer something similar to the colour shift plus fluresence result.)
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What I do like about the strong shadow/halo is that it’s easily detectible even if there’s a lone small item highlighted. Plain changed color makes it difficult to discern a small highlighted item.
I’m tempted to wish all aspect of it would be configurable - color shift, fluorecence filter, halo color, even halo shape. But maybe it’s too much for such simple thing.
That is a good point.
I think the general style should be fixed (either halo, some colour change, or something else entirely)
Within each of these there can then be settings (for halo i would make the colour and size selectable, for colour change the degrees plus fluorescence amount, …)
I think you are overthinking this. It doesn’t matter that text is less readable when selected. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t look very good. By far the most important requirement for selection markup is that it has to be easy to visually identify what is selected and what isn’t. I’d say current method does it quite well.
You will not be editing selected text, you will not be staring at selected things for longer than is necessary to move it or press ctrl-c. It does it’s job and that’s good enough.
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I’m tempted to agree with that, too. I just don’t want to fall into trap of thinking I know all use cases for all users and being wrong. Most of the time what you say is true.
On the other hand pleasant visual appearance is part of a good UX.
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Isn’t selection highlighting also what is used to cross probe to the layout (Allow finding the footprint of the “selection highlighted” symbol.) Or has this changed in nightly and there is now a new tool for that? (This usecase kind of requires text to stay readable)
The symbol whose footprint is selected in pcbnew is colored but not shadow-highlighted in eeschema. Selecting a symbol in eeschema highlights the corresponding footprint, but there’s no distinction between selecting and highlighting in that case in eeschema. Here’s a crossprobe-highlight, footprint selected from pcbnew:
I’ve submitted a patch to the dev-list that adds three new options that affects selection highlight appearance:
- Draw selected text items as box
- Draw selected child items
- Fill selected shapes
Attached are some screenshots with various combinations of these settings.
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Nice work. How does the highlighting look if the symbols use background fill?
I think it works great also for filled symbols. Here are two examples with and without “fill selected shapes” enabled.
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I am being quite out since the Nighties aren’t available to Ubuntu 16.04 anymore…
In this case of multiple part selection (on Eeschema only) are it reflected to Pcbnew? (The Pcbnew parts get selected/highlight in case of multiple parts selected on Eeschema?)
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