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I need to give an option to show or hide certain detail. What's a good pair of icons for "show/hide"?

Sorry, let me clarify. I am going to use it in a MS Office Ribbon style navbar at the top. The text will be "Show All Tasks" or "Hide Unused Tasks" (it's a project management type application). So I would like an icon to go with the text. Also, because it's in the ribbon, it's not right next to the item it will hide or show.

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closed as off topic by Benny Skogberg, JonW♦ May 19 '12 at 7:57

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How about these two:

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  • Glad I could help :). The original icon is from here. – Vitaly Mijiritsky Mar 21 '11 at 20:49
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    Because of “not right next to the item it will hide or show” there’s a classic problem: what do this icons show — a state or an action? A top one, for example, does it mean that one already sees all the details or does it mean that one should press it to see all the details? – Nikita Prokopov Mar 25 '11 at 10:02
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You can use “...” instead of icon, or just go with the labels (Show/Hide), they are of good size (not too small to click and not too big to make a much noise) and are very easy to understand.

Another option is to use arrows (▶/▼), or +/-, like in Windows file system trees.

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I like an Open and Close Eye... but I guess you can use the Windows paradigm that is the most comon in people mind.

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  • What is the Windows paradigm? – richard Mar 17 '11 at 16:45
  • The Undersscore and the litle boxes, like in the top right corner of your normal windows window. – Gerardo Jaramillo Mar 17 '11 at 17:45

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