Hi Larry,
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I think that
http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/quantum-gis/New_Labeling_changes_and_roadmap is
a very good list to see the progress and what unimplemented ideas are in
the pipeline.
I think the most important things are:
* improve perfomance of the label drawing
* make sure that text can stay as text (if possible with reasonable
effort)
* and that the buffers can be drawn with reasonable speed
* removal of old labeling GUI
All the other stuff can be done after 2.0 - but the above things should
be fixed if possible.
Do you have estimates how much dev time the above 4 points would need?
Do you think that you can fix these 4 issues until feature freeze?
Can the PSC please decide whether we can fund this work from the QGIS
account? As to my knowledge we have a reasonable amount of money in our
bank account that we should use to fix the most important issues for
QGIS 2.0.
Thanks,
Andreas
On Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:24:04 -0700, Larry Shaffer wrote:
Hi Andreas,
On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Andreas Neumann
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Larry, Hi all,
At the Essen developer meeting we discussed that we want to get rid
of
the double versions (labeling, symbology, diagrams - more?)
The new diagram are now in good shape thanks to the work of Matthias
Kuhn and Marco Hugentobler.
I now that Larry did a tremendous amount of work on the new label
engine, next to the work Marco H. and Martin Dobias did before.
I don't have the exact overview what features from the old engine
are
not yet present in the new engine.
In Essen we proposed that we ask Larry to continue his work to get
rid
of the old label engine - and we proposed that we would pay a
certain
amount of our funds to Larry for this work.
Question to Larry and the PSC? What is the status of this work? Was
there any agreement so far between the PSC and Larry to fund his
work?
Larry - would you have time to continue working on it so we can get
rid
of the old labeling?
There are two lists you can reference on the wiki (both of which I
updated, or reorganized a bit, this morning)[0][1]. Neither of the
lists speaks directly to what exactly needs done to remove the old
labeling.
There is at least one major issue remaining (that I know of):
Label text should be preserved as text in output (regression) - This
issue also possibly relates to the slower performance many users are
seeing between the old labeling and new. Dr. Marco H. mentioned he
thinks the older method using QPainter::drawText() might be faster
than the current QPainterPath::addText() method. However, I'm not
sure
all new features can be done using the older method. Regardless,
using
a different method where possible, one that outputs text as text,
would be very beneficial when using the resultant SVG or PDF output
in
other applications. Users currently rely upon the old engine for that
purpose.
I am not sure if any other QGIS functionality still uses the old
labeling engine. Even so, at least updating the new engine's features
to the point of removing the old engine's gui should be a priority;
while removing the old labeling engine code could be done later.
Regarding any funding, beyond the noted issue above, you might want
to
review list at [1] for candidates on what you would specifically like
to see in version 2.0. The new end-of-December feature freeze means I
have to start paring that list down.
[0]
http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/quantum-gis/Switching_from_Old_to_New_Symbology_and_Labeling#Labeling
[1]
http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/quantum-gis/New_Labeling_changes_and_roadmap
Regards,
Larry Shaffer
Dakota Cartography
Black Hills, South Dakota
Thanks for an update on it.
Andreas
--
--
Andreas Neumann
Böschacherstrasse 10A
8624 Grüt (Gossau ZH)
Switzerland
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