[GRASS-dev] ps.map consolidation

[Hamish]

Jachym Cepicky wrote:
> > some ideas here:
> > http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_GUI#Cartography:_GUI_front_end_for_ps.map
> >
> > My idea was to combine both ways, sort of like how QGIS is
> > organized. blank preview page on the right side of the GUI (portrait
> > or landscape) with solid black border for map box and colored dashed
> > lines for the different text/legend boxes. To begin with have those
> > drawn from map control placement settings, but in future you could
> > drag those around to update the instructions settings (adjust box of
> > currently selected instruction for overlap-proofing). In the
> > far-future you would see low res preview instead of just rectangles.
> 
> I see the problem in "guessing" the box sizes. e.g. you can place the
> legend box somewhere on the paper, but you can not tell, how wide and
> height the box will be. That is, why I was proposing to find a
> sollution, that each object of the map would be stored in separate
> layer, so it could be regenerated ones the user changes some
> properity.

You don't have to guess the box sizes at all. The only tricky part is to
recreate the scale-> map size calculation, which isn't so hard to do.
(I was doing this by hand in the last month while fixing bugs #3096 and
5454)

for things like legend box, we know the page size in inches, and the x,y
offset in inches, and the height/width in inches (and can look up the
defaults), so no guessing there either.

some more work is needed for e.g. the scalebar which is places by its
center not its top left corner.

so just a bunch of 1-2-3-4 work, not guess work.

?

> I did something, what you are proposing allready, some months ago:
> http://wwwold.fle.czu.cz/~jachym/img/grass/gpsmap-0.1.2.png but as I
> said, it was hard to determine the box dimensions..

ah yes, exactly. so not so much my idea at all. :)

> I like the rest, you are writing, nice concept. Only the list of
> layers should be taken from current map display

I think that could be added in a future prototype, along with loading of
a prior ps.map instructions file. It is nice, but not specifically
needed to run the program.


Hamish