QGIS Plugins planet

Introducing the Latest Style User Interface Improvements

August 15, 2012 Anita Graser

Yesterday, Martin Dobias announced that Arun’s GSoC work on QGIS symbology has been merged into the developer version. So let’s have a look at todays nightly-build!

I’ll step through the features mentioned in the announcement to see how they look and work:

1. Style manager has been greatly improved: grouping of symbols, tagging, “smart” groups (showing only symbols matching some criteria), search

On opening new Style Manager, we can already see that it has changed considerably: There are groups on the left, tags at the bottom and a search field in the upper right corner.

new Style Manager

New groups are created with the “+” button and styles can be added using the context menu:

adding a style to a group

2. Symbol selector and properties dialogs have been integrated to just one dialog, improving the usability a lot

Instead of opening tons of nested windows, complex styles can now be easily edited using the symbol layer tree on the left:

3. Style database is now stored in a SQLite database rather than an XML file for better scalability. You can import all your saved symbols and color ramps from ~/.qgis/symbology-ng-style.xml – from now they will be stored in ~/.qgis/symbology-ng-style.db.

Importing through Style Manager works like a charm. All styles will be imported into the given group.

importing previous style.xml

4. Style import improvements: load style directly from given URL, saving imported symbols into a group

Instead of giving a path to a style XML, it’s also possible to specify a URL. That’s a great step towards shared symbol libraries!

5. SVG fill: shows directories for easier traversal through the SVG directories

Definitely a plus! It’s now much easier to work with big SVG symbol collections.

What a great result of this year’s Google Summer of Code for QGIS. Give these new features a try! I already fell in love with them.

by underdark at 4:11 PM under google summer of code , qgis (Comments)

A First Glimpse at the QGIS Processing Framework

June 4, 2011 Anita Graser

The aim of QGIS Processing Framework developed by Polymeris is to provide a generic framework for accessing existing geo-processing functionality of e.g. SAGA, GRASS, Orfeo Toolbox, etc. This should enable users to script their geo-processing work in python console and allow development of a tool to graphically build workflows using VisTrails an “open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system”.

For a first impression, Polymeris has published some screenshots of QGIS with SAGA modules loaded: [1],[2]

This project is big and if it turns out well, QGIS will profit enormously from it. Both scriptable geoprocessing functionality and a graphic workflow builder can improve user experience a lot if they are implemented well. You can follow further development on the project homepage on GitHub.