[Qgis-developer] Re: composer redesign branch

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Martin and others

Martin I agree your listed options will be a better design. Im just
worried about time scales (we need to get 1.0 out this year - and
ideally before sept in time for FOSS4GEO2008) and about the fact that
Gavin may be off at sea, having set some contractors to work on
composer stuff. The other nice thing about the design change is that
raster and vector will work in similar way (both using renderers) if I
understand things right.  So the questions are I guess:

a) how long will it take
b) who is willing to work on this
c) do others agree to trying to get this implemented in 1.0

One important thing is to really try to consider render performance in
any redisign. QGIS has been steadily getting slower at rendering
vectors over the last few years and it would be good to try to address
this before 1.0 goes out.

Best Regards

Tim


> Guys,
>
> when talking about improvements with composer, what are your plans -
> do the changes as small as possible or are you open for some more
> improvements? Generally I'd like to see these features:
> - introduce "map rendering context" which will contain information
> about rendering (we've talked about that already on the list)
> - improve renderers' interface so that renderer itself will do the
> drawing (instead of letting QgsVectorLayer do the real drawing). This
> will help renderer to decide whether to draw and cache pixmaps
> depending on the rendering context (i.e. drawing to a pixmap or
> drawing to vector output). Moreover this will enable clean
> implementation of advanced renderers like drawing arrows etc.
> - separate map composer frontend and backend, so the backend will be
> moved to core library and could be used in plugins / 3rd party apps
>
> If you like these things (or at least some of them :-) I'll be happy
> to cooperate.
>
> Regards
> Martin
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-developer mailing list
> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
>


-- 
Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee Member - Release  Manager
Visit http://qgis.org for a great open source GIS
openModeller Desktop Developer
Visit http://openModeller.sf.net for a great open source ecological
niche modelling tool
Home Page: http://tim.linfiniti.com
Skype: timlinux
Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net