[Qgis-developer] Re: New Symbology : merge borders on nodes for lines

[Ramon Andinach]

On 17/02/2011, at 20:59 , Martin Dobias wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 1:33 PM, kimaidou <kimaidou at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 2011/2/17 Carson Farmer <carson.farmer at gmail.com>
>>> 
>>> Perhaps 'Symbol layer ordering' or simply 'layer order'?
>> 
>> I dislike "layer order" as it is confusing : do we speak of layers from the
>> canvas ? Or "style" layers ?
>> For me we should use the term "layer" in Qgis only for vector and raster
>> layers
> 
> Frankly, with the introduction of symbology-ng I have created some
> mess in the terminology and I am not sure how to get out of this.
> Where are the problems:
> - "style" - before the style referred to Layer style (i.e. renderer,
> labeling). symbology-ng uses this term for a collection of symbols
> (and other visual items)
> - "color ramp" - a convenient source of colors for symbology-ng.
> Shouldn't that be called a "colormap" since it could be either a color
> gradient, colors from a palette or just a bunch of random colors?
> - "layer" - there are map layers and there are symbol layers. I think
> that generally speaking, a layer always means a map layer.
> - "categorized" / "graduated" renderer - I remember Carson raising the
> discussion that these terms are not very clear
> 
> An insight from a english native speaker and preferably a user of
> several GIS would be valuable. It would be good to disambiguate the
> terms.

If you'll count an Australian as an English speaker...

I'd prefer "colormap", for the reason that you give.

With "categorized" and "graduated" I think that they are clear enough, but not what I would expect. If you were making a graph I was taught "discrete" and "continuous" to describe these data types, and that is what I'd expect. 
The problem is categorized. Categorized data is data that's been grouped into subsets (bins). So even the "graduated" data becomes categorized. 
(Take a set of numbers between 1 and 50 {1,2,11,13,22,24,33,35,44,46}, which I treat as "graduated" data. I could then categorize them into 5 groups of equal ranges {1,2}{11,13}{22,24}{33,35}{44,46} )

For the rest, I've not really used the new symbology enough to comment on.

I've some experience with Mapinfo and I don't think they way it did symbols is comparable to this. This is better.

-ramon.