[Qgis-developer] Removing old labelling

[Martin Dobias]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Nathan Woodrow <madmanwoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Any objections for removing the old labelling stuff?
>
> Is there anything the old one can do the new one can't?
>
> I'm finding users are getting confused that there are two
> different labelling engines and this is bad for user experience.  Also makes
> training hard as you have to tell people to ignore that part of the program
> when labelling is something everyone wants to do.

Hi

I will try to add my thoughts:
- I would be very happy to see old labeling removed - that's one of
the things to address in 2.0 (but 1.8 must keep compatibility)
- in meanwhile technically old and new labeling are completely
independent from each other - they can be even used both at the same
time ;-) but I wonder who would ever want that
- generally there are two concerns regarding new labeling: 1. missing
features and 2. performance

Ad 1: missing features:
There was a call to make a list of missing features on the wiki page
[1]. In the list I see only two features present in old labeling and
not in new labeling (buffer transparency, label rotation - neither
really crucial). The rest of the items are feature requests and bug
reports. That indicates that feature-wise new labeling is quite in
parity.

Ad 2: performance:
There are cases when labeling is slow: most prominently polygon
labeling tends to be a problem when polygons contain more vertices. I
hope to address this problem with a faster algorithm. Another problem
I am aware of is with general labeling in presence of lots of features
(where each label candidate overlaps with dozens of other features).

[1] http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/17/Switching_from_Old_to_New_Symbology_and_Labeling

Regards
Martin