[Qgis-developer] Digitising icons

[Marco Hugentobler]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your help. I also think that the digitising tools would benefit 
from some polishing.

>  - I would like to revise the digitising icons - they are not all
> consistent and in retrospect that blue background I put behind icons
> reduces contrast and makes it hard to visually separate one from the
> other. I've made a quick mockup in the GIMP (attached). If folks are
> happy with those as concept Ill do them more neatly (in particularly
> anti-aliased) as svgs and then export to pngs. Any objections?

+1. The new icons look good and I think they are clearer. E.g. the difference 
move features / move Vertex is clearer visible and also the meaning of 'add 
ring' and 'add island' operation is easier to get.

> - The slow point for me in digitising now is atrribute data capture.
> In particular working with keyboard or mouse involves extra clicks to
> move between fiellds - when you capture a lot of data these all add up
> to a chunk of time lost. I propose as a short term fix to make the
> field names row headings rather than cell values to eliminate needing
> to tab through field headings when jumping from cell to cell. In the
> longer term I would like to change the ui to dynamically generate a
> form with suitable widgets based on the data type being entered. Ill
> come back to that in a future release though.

I don't understand what you mean with the short time fix. Do you mean to 
enable the possibility to jump from the end of a column to the beginning of 
the next with tab key?

> - the vertex marker cross hairs  are in my opinion too long and take
> on the pen style of the layer which can look a bit strange at times.
> As a short term fix I would like to suggest shortening the length of
> the marker arms and use a standard red, 2px pen for rendering them. In
> the longer term it might be nice to use little circles.

Yes, a circle or maybe a square with transparent fill would be nice. I'm going 
to take a look at udig and jump to see what they use.

> - we should aim to use a single icon for capturing point line or
> polygon with its image being changed in accordance to the context of
> the layer type being edited.

Also in my opinion, the digitising toolbar takes too much space. I'd like to 
use a dropdown list for the tools. So there would be only a button for 
start/stop editing and a dropdown list for the tools.

Regards,
Marco

-- 
Dr. Marco Hugentobler
Institute of Cartography
ETH Zurich
Technical Advisor QGIS Project Steering Committee