Sketcher: poor visibility of dimension labels and construction geometry with the default settings

[FEA-eng]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Problem description

This was raised during the discussion about #10100 but I'm talking specifically about the dimension labels and construction geometry and with no relation to colorblindness. IMO their visibility is really bad with the default settings, especially within the darker (top) region of the background:

I even find it difficult to prepare good-looking screenshots for Sketcher release notes.

I would like to propose 2 solutions (that can be implemented regardless of the big issue about colorblindness):

1. changing the default dimension and construction geometry color to something more visible on the default background (white? yellow?)
2. changing the default background to a lighter one

I would probably go with 1 since 2 is a bigger decision. Here's what it looks like in Abaqus which also uses a dark background:

I don't say it's perfect but at least everything is easily distinguishable. It seems that CATIA (another dark blue background) uses green for both dimensions and constrained sketch geometry but we should probably stay with separate colors for them.

Full version info

OS: Windows 10 build 19045
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.22.0dev.36731 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: main
Hash: ac1d887336826c59321352f49a195bf1ef8be2f0
Python 3.11.8, Qt 5.15.13, Coin 4.0.2, Vtk 9.2.6, OCC 7.7.2
Locale: Polish/Poland (pl_PL)

Subproject(s) affected?

Sketcher

Anything else?

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[obelisk79]

I would propose that the text label of dimensions should have a small solid color background. Otherwise there will always be circumstances where readability may suffer with solid geometry displayed while sketching.

[PaddleStroke]

Default colors sucks imo. I think we should change all the colors to something like OpenLight theme colors. No point in keeping default freecad very bad.

[FEA-eng]

Default colors sucks imo. I think we should change all the colors to something like OpenLight theme colors. No point in keeping default freecad very bad.

There’s an ongoing discussion about themes here: #13650

Unfortunately, it’s going in the direction of keeping modern themes as add-ons and including only the old ones in the default package. I think that 1.0 is a good opportunity to refresh the default appearance of FreeCAD: https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=87002&start=20#p754918

[pierreporte]

The shadowed text isn’t a default theme issue though. I remember that it wasn’t several years ago. Now, the lighter the text, the more blurry. The screenshot shows this: red is lighter than blue (for the eyes, not the computer) thus less readable even on the darker side of the 3D view.

I don’t know of a single program that have a background for dimensions since their themes are all better (in this matter at least) and they don’t have shadowed text. Though there are sometimes cases when the background is too close to the dimension color, especially when drawing above visible geometry (looking at you Catia). It can still be a good idea but it needs to be very discreet. I propose to use the average background color and to put the rectangle in the background, but in front of everything that isn’t in the sketch. Maybe with transparency to avoid masking things too much.

The default theme indeed sucks though. This should be solved by integrating two new official themes, light and dark, that are better designed. OpenLight or OpenDark for instance but not necessarily, unless we want them in time for 1.0.