[GRASS-dev] GRASS 6.3.0 release preparation

[Michael Barton]

On 8/11/07 9:31 AM, "Helena Mitasova" <hmitaso at unity.ncsu.edu> wrote:

> If you ask me what was the most annoying (but not critica) thing that
> I have found when using
> GRASS under a deadline - then it was the large default size of the
> centroid symbol in d.vect.
>   I had to go through large number of vector data when preparing the
> new data set
> and each time I forgot to set the size smaller I got the unreadable
> mess of overlapping crosses.
> So if we could change the default to something smaller - perhaps size
> 2 rather than 5,

It looks like the default is 8, which is really large for centroids. would
be fine for centroids. 5 is probably OK for points though.

> that would be great, because most of the time you really want to see
> your polygons
> not the centroids and they are quite visible at size 2 even with my
> old eyes

Agreed. My preference would be have the centroids turned off by default,
rather than on as is the current default.

> (maybe make the default red as the default fill is grey). This was
> already
> discussed some time ago too.

This is a problem since there is no way to set point colors separately from
general line/fill colors that also affect polygons and arcs. I can see the
benefit of it, but it would require yet another pair of options for d.vect
(and updating of the TclTk options panel in the GUI).

While we're on the subject of default preferences, I'd like to request that
'overlay' be the default for d.rast. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I nearly
always want a raster to be able to overlay another so that the bottom one
will show through the nulls of the top one--unless I want to set the nulls
to some specific background color. Thinking about it, the whole thing could
be handled in the background color setting. "None", the default, would make
nulls transparent to underlying maps; picking any other color would make
nulls opaque and set them to the desired color.

Michael

__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton