[GRASS-user] GUI enhancements

[Maciej Sieczka]

Glynn Clements wrote:
> Michael Barton wrote:
> 
>>> Perhaps these have been mentioned before but I haven't found it.
>>> Possible additions to the GUI:
>>> 1) Various styles of dotted or dashed lines
>>> 2) Ability to select multiple files (say vectors) and change them (say
>>> colour or width) all simultaneously.
>>>
>>> I'm trying to display a dem basemap, hydrology layer, and 10 important
>>> vector lines all in grey scale (for publication). There just aren't
>>> enough shades of grey for that.

>> Good ideas that I and other people would like to see too. These would need
>> to be implemented in the underlying GRASS display command (d.vect) rather
>> than the GUI. It can only show what d.vect produces.
> 
> And d.vect can only produce that which is supported by the graphics
> architecture. Currently, that doesn't include dashed lines.
> 
> Wait for 7.x, when extending the set of available graphics functions
> will become a lot easier.

For now you can try QGIS, which reads GRASS vectors (and rasters, if
gdal-grass plugin is installed). It provides several line and point
styles, polygon fill patterns, thematic mapping, and a GUI map composer
with ps/pdf/svg/bitmap output option. Be warned though that the map
composer has problems: irregular letter spacing, labels placement and
size in the project not always corresponds to that on the resultant
map, line widths in the legend happen to not correspond to those on the
map, vector point symbols get rasterized in the ps/pdf/svg output. At
least some of these are due to bugs in (older?) QT. In spite of these
issues, AFAICT QGIS provides the only *GUI* map composer for GRASS data
currently.

Maciek