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Chevrons along each curve, pointing the way it runs.

Menu: View > Show Curve Direction | In depth: The canvas

A cycling toggle with three states rather than two, off by default.

Every curve has a direction: a start, an end, and a way round. It decides which side an offset falls on, and it is the whole subject of Reverse Direction. None of it used to be visible, so the only way to find out which way a curve ran was to do something to it and watch what happened, which meant changing the drawing in order to ask a question about it.

This draws the answer instead.

Clicking the menu item cycles through them in this order:

1. Off. Nothing is drawn.
2. Selected. Marks on the selection only. This answers a question about one object without burying the rest of the pattern, which is why it comes first on the way up from off.
3. All. Marks on everything.

The menu shows which state you are in with one marker: no tick for off, a dimmed tick for selected, a solid tick for all.

It is remembered between sessions.

The rule is written in screen pixels, not drawing units, so the marks stay the same distance apart however far you zoom and what you see follows how big a curve looks rather than what units you are working in.

• Roughly every 48 pixels along the curve.
• At most six marks on any one curve, so a long edge does not turn into a dotted line.
• No mark ever lands on an endpoint, where it would read as belonging to the point rather than to the curve. A curve carrying a single mark gets it at the midpoint.

A curve shorter than about 24 pixels on screen gets no mark at all. That is deliberate rather than an oversight. Promising every curve at least one mark buries a dense run of short segments under a solid mass of chevrons, and then you cannot see the shape underneath, which was the thing you were looking at. Small work is left clean, and you get its direction back by zooming in: each segment crosses the threshold and takes its own mark.

A chevron of 45 degrees, in blue, drawn half transparent over a soft halo so it reads as a layer floating over the work rather than as part of it. An opaque mark would hide the geometry it is annotating.

It is sized in screen pixels like a dimension arrow, not in proportion to the line it sits on. A heavy stroke nudges the arm and the weight up a little, just enough to keep the mark clear of the line, and both are capped: a mark that merely matched the stroke would vanish into a hairline, and one that scaled with a heavy stroke would bury the drawing.

Show Region Direction is its own toggle, in blue's counterpart orange, and it answers a different question: not which way somebody drew a curve, but which way round a region's boundary winds, and so which side holds material.

A region built from curves can show both at once. The two sets sit half a step apart and interleave along the same boundary, each still sitting on the line it describes.

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