[Qgis-developer] Bringing diagrams into labeling-ng

[Andreas Neumann]

 Hi,

 I would certainly welcome the integration of labels and diagrams to 
 avoid overlapping. I can't comment on the technical/architectural 
 issues.

> I agree. The WMS benchmark also showed labeling to be a critical 
> performance
> factor (but it is still unclear to me wether this is because text 
> rendering,
> candidate position generation or conflict resolution). However, 
> bringing
> together the two systems could make it easier to enhance performance
> for both.

 The speed is currently fine for our purposes (labeling lines and 
 integrating them with manually positioned labels). Of course it can 
 always be faster. But it works fine for us. We suppress most labels when 
 zooming out or only display major labels.

>> it would be nice to be able to
>>interactively place the diagrams as you have done with labels. How
>>would the diagram's placement be persisted? In the same way as labels
>>using a specified columns? Some users have requested that label
>>placement could work like E$RI where the labels can be turned into
>>graphics and placement is stored in the project file (or whatever the
>>ESRI equivalent of that is) - so that you don't
>
> The placement would be the same as for labels (stored in columns).
> The option
> to change the objects to graphics would be nice. Technically, it 
> could
> probably be done by turning the labels into annotation objects
> (QgsTextAnnotation). However, this is out of scope for me at the 
> moment.

 I personally prefer the current behavior of QGIS, storing positions, 
 anchors, rotation and other label settings as separate columns in the 
 database or other data sources. These labels need to be shared in many 
 different projects and across several applications, so I don't see a 
 benefit of storing label data within a single QGIS project file. The 
 project file is just a shell/a bunch of settings. The data is the 
 jewels. Also, when storing the labels within the QGIS project file, they 
 aren't accessible to other software besides QGIS. QGIS is not like ESRI 
 that needs to lock out other systems. I usually like to see raw data 
 separated from project settings. A mixture of some data in the database 
 and some in the project file makes things more difficult to deal with 
 and less accessible.

 I am not opposing to having the label storage also in a project file, I 
 am just stating that I am personally not interested, for the above 
 reasons.

 Thanks,
 Andreas

 --
 Andreas Neumann
 Böschacherstrasse 10A
 8624 Grüt (Gossau ZH)
 Switzerland