Hi Andrew,
On 3/24/11 9:15 PM, Andrew Chapman wrote:
I've been looking at the labelling in trunk... and feel that there is a lot
of power and features that I don't fully understand.
1) We now have the "Labels" dialog under layer properties and the "Layer
labelling setting" dialog accessed via the "ABC" tool. To what extent do the
settings via these dialogs interact, or should they be used as an "all or
nothing" choice?
currently you should only use the "ABC" tool, which is the new
generation. The other one is still for backwards compatibility. The
first generation will disappear with QGIS 2.0 - so please use the new
generation with the "ABC" button.
2) Via the "Labels" dialog Advanced tab there are interesting settings that
can be defined by attribute, but their accepted parameters aren't (at least
to me), immediately apparent. It seems that if anything is defined on the
Advanced tab then the settings on the Label Properties tab are ignored - is
this correct?
- Placement: Is this numeric, or some sort of predefined constants?
- Angle: This seems to be decimal (0 to 360... or is it MOD 360?), with
zero due east and rotating anticlockwise.
- Font family: I assume that this is just the name of an installed font,
e.g. Arial.
- Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikeout: This I assume to be a boolean, but
null or any value, 0 or 1, false or true... ?
- Size: This seems to take the font size choice (In points / In map units)
from the Label Properties Tab.
- Size units: Again, is this defined by string or numeric values?
- Color: I assume that this is a RGB value, but in what format?
- Data defined position: X& Y coordinates - I assume these are in the
form of the current CRS. The X& Y offsets (from their names) are presumably
signed values. If I size my text in map units, does this mean that I cannot
have an offset in map units too?
Please use only the "ABC" tool - your above questions seem to relate to
the old version.
It is right that often it is not obvious what to use. There should be
tooltips or it should be mentioned in the manual. I try to answer a few
of the questions, but I relate them to the new generation:
Size and Buffer Size: numeric. You can select units - either pt or map
units. The former is always the same size, the latter changes size with
zooming
Color and Buffer color: a hexadecimal color value, e.b. #FF0000 for red,
datatype string
Font-Family: String containing the font-name - should correspond to the
family name you see in the qt-font dialogues
bold, italic, underline, etc. - I am not sure what should be used here -
maybe a boolean?
Label Distance: numeric - either in mm or in map units. For text along
linear features, this is an offset from the center line
Rotation: numeric. 0 is horizontal, negative is counter clockwise,
positive is clockwise
X-Coordinate/Y-Coordinate: numeric, in map units
Horizontal Alignment: string value, any of "Left|Center|Right"
Vertical Alignment: string value, any of "Top|Cap|Half|Base|Bottom"
Hope this helps a bit. I agree, it could be more obvious what values
there should be and it is not ideal that there is an old and new generation.
Andreas
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