[Qgis-developer] Re: composer redesign branch

[Martin Dobias]

On Feb 10, 2008 9:59 PM, Steven Bell <botsnlinux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For now, I suggest just merging the angular renderer changes into the
> composer redesign branch, keeping the non-caching behavior.  I have been
> very busy the last month or so, but I expect to have some time in about a
> week to work on it.  If others want to do it, go ahead.
>  I'd like to do some more testing of the speed of the different branches.
> Ultimately, a combination may be best - caching when working with data, and
> full rendering when printing.
> Steven

Guys,

when talking about improvements with composer, what are your plans -
do the changes as small as possible or are you open for some more
improvements? Generally I'd like to see these features:
- introduce "map rendering context" which will contain information
about rendering (we've talked about that already on the list)
- improve renderers' interface so that renderer itself will do the
drawing (instead of letting QgsVectorLayer do the real drawing). This
will help renderer to decide whether to draw and cache pixmaps
depending on the rendering context (i.e. drawing to a pixmap or
drawing to vector output). Moreover this will enable clean
implementation of advanced renderers like drawing arrows etc.
- separate map composer frontend and backend, so the backend will be
moved to core library and could be used in plugins / 3rd party apps

If you like these things (or at least some of them :-) I'll be happy
to cooperate.

Regards
Martin