[Qgis-developer] dot density plugin (anyone used eLance to fund development?)

[John Abraham]

Hi everyone.

I want to build a better dot-density map plugin.  The one that is included in the "Vector->Research Tools->Random Points" is a bit clumsy because: 

a) you already need to have a field describing the number of points, and a lot of the time I want to try 1dot=100 and 1dot=500 and 1dot=1000 in an interactive way to see what looks better, and not have to go into the attributes (or PostGIS) to try different numbers, and

b) usually I want to have several fields shown at once (blue dots for households and green dots for jobs, or different shades of blue for data from different years)

c) sometimes I want to show negative numbers too, in a different color (1 red dot = 100 less jobs, 1 blue dot = 100 more jobs)

It's probably a pretty easy python plugin to develop, simply build a new layer with random dots generated from several fields, each dot with a single attribute being the field it was generated from. And a user dialog to select the field and the (positive or negative) ratio of dots per field value.    The color coding can be done by the user afterwards, in the new layer. 

I don't think I can write this myself or in-house right now since I'm more of a Java programmer and our best python programmer is swamped.  I'm thinking of outsourcing it to eLance.com, since QGIS.ORG cannot accept earmarked donations.  What do you guys think?  Or should I just file a feature request in the bug tracking system and hope for the best?

--
John Abraham
jea at hbaspecto.com