[GRASS-dev] GSoC 2013, GRASS symbology idea

[Helena Mitasova]

Tereza,

what you have written is on track, but you could add more specifics.

To find out what the issues are you can try to run this little practice
http://courses.ncsu.edu/mea582/common/GIS_anal_grass/GIS_Anal_granal2.html
where several of the outputs should be saved as an image for a report or a publication
and you need to have a legend included to understand the results
(so we are not creating large format printed maps).
The raster legend is there with many options and it has been improved greatly,
but if you try to use it through wxGUI you will see that it is easy to get stuck
(e.g. because the legend GUI panel is behind the display or it keeps the raster from the previous 
map, and the two levels of panels are rather confusing to users, etc.). 
Then you want to show that your blue points are all schools and cyan points are
schools affected by noise but there is no tool to do that (as far as I know), and we also want
to show that the streets are grey lines etc., so the legend even for the very simple
vector data is not there. And these are just very simple tasks, you can define the color for the vector
data in the attribute table and then you really want to have a vector legend similar to
rasters. And then for points, the legend for different symbols. 

So there is plenty of work 
to do to improve the graphical output and you should look at what is there now and try to
define more details for your project. And get a lot of practice with GRASS,
so that you get a good sense how things work - you can try to go through some of these
(GRASS solution has the link to the practice)
http://courses.ncsu.edu/mea582/common/GIS_anal_assign/GIS_Anal_Assignall.html

I hipe this helps,

Helena

Helena Mitasova
Associate Professor
Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
2800 Faucette Drive, Rm. 1125 Jordan Hall
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
hmitaso at ncsu.edu

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On Apr 24, 2013, at 5:02 PM, Tereza Fiedlerová wrote:

> Hello Hamish,
> 
> thanks for your response.  I understand that I should not try to replace ps.map, just improve some d.* modules. But from notes on Grass GSoc 2013 Ideas I didn't know what exactly is needed. 
> 
> I wrote:
> In my project, I would like to write new module for creating legend for vector map (something similar as d.legend for raster map). The other part of project could be new module for thematic maps (something like d.vect.thematic and d.area.thematic, but more complex). For a nice and correct graphical output I could do some improvements in cairo driver.
> 
> Is this suggestion, as I wrote it before, useful? Or should I focus on something different? I am not very experienced with Grass, so I will be thankful for any other suggestions, that help me get a better picture about it.
> 
> Tereza 
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