[Qgis-developer] Re: Working on Symbology Improvement for the GSOC

[aruntheguy at gmail.com]

Hello,

After working with the Symbology as a user for the past couple of days and
trying to accomplish various things, here is my idea of simplifying things:

Decouple Style management and Style application (renderer) logic at the GUI
level itself.

First let us start where it all begins, simplification of the GUI and
reducing the number of modal dialogs that keep opening as we go customizing
the symbol layers. This presumably is the best approach as it gives the
possibility to provide almost infinite customization options to the user.
But, customization of layers is not going to be my priority when I am
applying styles, or at least thats not what I intend to do. I just want to
see the styles and pick the most suitable.

If I want to be creative and design new symbols/styles, which I may now use
or may not now use, why should I be doing it in a layers properties dialog.
I would rather have a designer where I can design my styles of the liking.
I ma even get to preview a composition of all the symbol styles that I have
created.

So the idea is to create such a decoupled designer, which is something like
a "Style Manager ++ (decoupled)". I am writing the possible solution and a
couple of ideas as a proposal which might contain some over sighted goals.
Kindly go through, evaluate and comment.

Proposal:

+ Remove Symbol Creating/Editing capabilities from the "Style" tab of Layer
Properties and retain only application(renderer) customizations like, size,
color, angle etc., This will remove the iterative dialog popup situation
and also keep the clutter in the UI to minimum.
+ Create a new symbol designer, that can be summoned up from Menu rather
than from the properties
+ The designer to perform following functions
    - Create new symbols/styles
    - Grouping and management of styles through a tree structure
    - Create and manage virtual groups (or themes) that would pull symbols
from various groups and a combination of renders to create a overall
cartographic stylesheet (almost same as present save/load style).
    - Ability to save a retrieve such stylesheets (duplicates the present
save/load style)

Apart from the above solution, the GSOC proposal to include,

- Creating tree structure for managing the SVG symbols
- Creating a non-modal widget type editor to change symbols on the fly or
adding that capability to the Layers legend.


-- 
Regards
Arunmozhi
Twitter: @tecoholic
Website: http://arunmozhi.in
IRC Nick: teco
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