[GRASSLIST:5584] Re: [GRASS5] Re: [Fwd: whinging about GRASS again]

[Moritz Lennert]

On Tue, February 1, 2005 0:39, Cefn Hoile said:
> Last week I set myself the project to view two GIS files overlaid one
> on the other in some rendering tool. I want to explore my local area
> for good paragliding sites. I therefore need to bring together
> elevation data, roads, and possibly land use data, and be able to
> explore a 3d map produced from these data to find south facing slopes.
>

[snip]

>
> I had a lot of patience for GRASS since I could see from the tutorials
> and demonstration data sets that my preferred end result (a navigable
> 3d surface) was straightforward once you had a properly imported data
> set for GRASS to read.
>
> Let us just say that I spent a long time messing around with it,
> reading all kinds of tutorials even before I could confirm to my
> satisfaction that the GRASS toolset could properly interpret the data I
> had, let alone render it. I still can't get the roads to render
> properly, but I now have the elevation data rendering.
>
> Doing things which I thought were practically unambiguous (starting
> with an empty project, and attempting to import data files to populate
> it) turned out to need some secret tricks to get them to do what I
> expected.

[snip]

>
> Although there are a set of simple steps to facilitate it, a lot of
> understanding of GRASS and how it was built was required to understand
> what these simple steps were. If I had been presented with a 'dummies
> new project from GIS file' process. I would have been a much happier
> user. I am now beginning to recognise the power of the underlying
> approach, but I came damn close to throwing in the towel after the 20th
> failed import.
>
> The need to specify a region I ran headlong into, leading to lots of
> blank screens. That was of course after I worked out that a display had
> to be launched and targeted, and after checking practically every
> checkbox and text entry of every menu option to see what I could
> possibly be doing wrong.
>


Could you (and others) explain what in

http://grass.itc.it/gdp/grass5tutor/HTML_en/c274.html
and especially
http://grass.itc.it/gdp/grass5tutor/HTML_en/c274.html#withunknowngeoref

is missing to get you going (except for the lack of mention of v.in.ogr) ?
Only by giving us feedback on the documentation and its lacks can we improve it.
If this page and the next seem alright, but just need updating to 6.0 than I
volunteer to do that, but only if I get feedback from users telling me that
this would be useful


> How about a wizard in the main menu which takes a file and renders it,
> creating a new project with the display range drawn from the file
> itself? With a project loaded, the same wizard menu item could allow
> you to import a new file to the same project, and provide you with the
> option to either, keep the region the same, or set the region according
> to the limits of the new file.

I would support this. It shouldn't be too hard to add a button to the start-up
screen "create new location from existing file", by creating a temp x,y
location, using v.in.ogr/r.in.gdal with the location= option and then launch
GRASS in the new location.

I've tried to look into this, but I don't have the time to get into the tcl/tk
logic, so I abandoned it...


Moritz