legend painting

[martijn at scanner.frw.uva.nl]

Hello Grass Programmers!

We have a bit of a problem: various users, wanting to paint a
nice presentable map and using the p.map tool, are getting
increasingly frustrated because they can't paint legends. Could
not one of you produce a "p.legend" tool in the wee hours of the
night? I've tried writing a shell script for producing a
legend, but I find that it's very difficult to get the legend
colors corresponding to the map colors. Now I've never done
any programming with the Grass libraries, but they look like
they might provide an easy way out of this.

The "p.legend" tool must:
- have all the possibilities of texts in "p.map", i.e. different
  fonts, background colors, highlights etc.;
- default towards displaying all cats from all the cell and vector
  maps that are painted;
- provide for interactive placement and scaling of the legend;
- include options for a north arrow and a bar scale;
- generally be perfect.

Piece of cake! Ain't it?

Martijn van Leusen
GIS Working Group - Faculty of Environmental Sciences
University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
martijn at scanner.frw.uva.nl