[GRASS-dev] Re: not quite there on fonts

[Michael Barton]

On 5/12/07 3:33 PM, "Paul Kelly" <paul-grass at stjohnspoint.co.uk> wrote:

> Interesting to see this - I guess this means there's no way to change the
> default background colour to anything other than white then? Was thinking
> this would be a useful setting for the GUI to have - e.g. I much preferred
> the default black background in GRASS <= 5, much easier on the eyes I
> thought.

That an interesting idea. Since we can set the default font, it's not a bad
idea to be able to set the default background. Of course you can already set
the background for rasters.

> 
> I was also noticing (have been trying out d.histogram while experimenting
> with fonts recently) that it seemed a bit non-intuitive that to display a
> histogram you had to treat it as a map you were displaying and it appeared
> in the Map display Window, with the region setting controls, co-ordinate
> display, etc. all intact. I was thinking it might be more logical and look
> tidier if it appeared in a separate graph display window - the background
> colour could perhaps even be set to be the same as the normal Window
> background colour and it might look very neat then.

This because all d.* commands (i.e., those that can be run
non-interactively) are treated conceptually by the TclTk GUI in the same way
they are treated in an xmon, as something that shows up in a graphics
window. A profile is the one exception, since I had to rebuild that
completely in TclTk (as d.profile is an interactive module that can't be
displayed in a TclTk canvas.

However, you'll be interested to learn that I've already done histogramming
in exactly the way you suggest for the new wxPython GUI. It seemed to me
also that it makes more sense to treat a histogram in a way that is visually
different from a map. So it appears in its own window. I'd like to set the
background, but it seems that it won't take any background color (I've tried
various ways to do this, including GRASS_BACKGROUNDCOLOR and nothing changes
the white background).


Scalebars and legends, along with user-placed text (as opposed to vector
labels), are also treated differently in the new GUI. They are treated as
decorative overlays that can be dragged and positioned interactively with
the mouse, rather than as map layers.
> 
> Maybe the new GUI does something like this already - I suppose I should be
> looking at it when commenting like this - this is neither a bug report or
> a wish, just a few thoughts I had that I thought I should write down!
> 

Do take a look at the development GUI. This is the place where we can think
about new ways to offer interactive access to GIS functionality.

Michael

__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
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