: What is this design pattern called? "Continuation wave." See the wavy line at the bottom of this graphic? I often see this visual technique used in software manuals and other material that

@Kimberly620

It is used in flow-charting or process mapping and it indicates a reference document, visio, powerpoint MS word etc.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Steve758

Perhaps this answer is too simplistic...?

Vote Up Vote Down

@Yeniel278

Its a break, and has many forms. It comes form the drafting standards. For example were you to draw a shaft it might be uninteresting to see the 1000 mm of similar shaft, so to conserve paper you can indicate that the line or shape has been broken into pieces.



Image 1: Variations on a theme the bottom right one needs a change to dimension line as well, very uncommon.

There are at least 3 others that i know of.

1 see cad.morainevalley.edu/documents/CADdeptStandards.pdf page II-9 for a specimen of shaft breaks

Vote Up Vote Down

@Alves566

Looking it up from a CAD / Architecture perspective it can be found referred to as Break Point or Break Line.

The Alphabet of Lines (PDF) has it as Break Lines:


Note the jagged break line to indicate that this is only part of the object.




In technical drawings it is as I tried to describe in comments depicted like this via Lines (pdf) though they refer to it as Cut Line



One interesting image via Google Image search was this one which shows how different mediums take on different cut lines / break lines:



You can see pretty easily how a website might take on some sort of curved or angled end to then illustrate the same concept.

Vote Up Vote Down