Arrows and curves

[HighlyIrregular]

Which arrow do you prefer?

arrows.png (2.26 KiB) Viewed 22 times

Paint 3D is deprecated and unavailable for Windows 11. It let you make curves pretty intuitively, where all the adjustable points were on the line and the line moved where you expected. There's a type of spline manipulation algorithm called Catmull-Rom that works like that. An app called Boxy uses it, but it adds a shadow, which probably isn't part of the image when you save it, but it's annoying, and I couldn't figure out how to change the line color. I didn't want to dig for info on that because it's way too basic for it to be so unintuitive. So I spent more than a day trying to figure out what tool to transition to to make custom arrows. I found nothing I liked! I'm currently using Paint, which doesn't anti-alias its curves and limits line thickness of curves, so I superimpose two copies of the curve, slightly offset to make it thicker, and use Irfanview to work some magic and reduce the size. That's how I made the above arrows.

[Senseye]

At first I thought you had inadvertently created an optical illusion that made the lower line look longer when they are the same length, but on closer inspection I believe the lower line is actually longer.

I prefer the lower one personally. Better symmetry around the line-arrow intersection although the line is a bit above the arrow joint (but that seems true in both cases).

[HighlyIrregular]

Me too. But no need now. I spent two days looking for an easy-enough to use substitute and found EdrawMax.

Wondershare-EdrawMax-arrows-curves.png (78.92 KiB) Viewed 3 times