[Qgis-developer] Composer... current status and the way forward?

Tue Nov 11 03:46:22 PST 2014

Hi,

Another thing which deserves some work IMO is the text boxes : either you
have to write HTML, or you're limited to 1 font/color/size per text box.
Even if it's not really linked to the global structure of the composer, an
improvement on this would have great impact on usability.

There must be some lightweight wysiwyg html editor library hat we could use
? Ideally it should implement styles that you can apply throughout a
project (probably through css classes, but I have the feeling someone
already talked about this idea ?).

And more about the live templates idea (if it's too much of a thread
hijacking please start another one) :

Maybe to avoid confusion between templates and live templates, we could
call the live templates "masters" ? That's how they are called in Adobe
Indesign (which is probably the most polished layouting software around).

http://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/master-pages.html

The thing Indesign isn't not doing well IMO is overrides : it involves an
awkward keyboard shortcut and it's hard to know what exactly is overridden
and what's not (what element, and what part of the element).
The property system you're mentioning would probably be an excellent thing
to manage inheritance.

And then, there's a question about whether the masters are global or
per-project.
The problem with global masters is that you can have effects on other files
without knowing it, and also that projects may display differently on
different setups. I think we should only have per-project masters.
And updating a project's layouts only involves reimporting the main master
once (that may be a bit tricky though if we want to keep overrides, but
using composer's items UUIDs we may make it work for some simple cases).

Thanks a lot for those bigger refactoring initiatives !

Olivier

2014-11-11 10:52 GMT+01:00 Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net>:

>  Hi,
>
> It would be very awesome to have live-linked templates! I would very much
> need them. I have a lot of operational projects and it is my fear that some
> day some details would change and I need to go into all of the projects and
> adopt things like logo, fonts, headers, etc. It would either require a
> script to process the .qgs files or a lot of manual work.
>
> So +1 for having live templates. Nyall, maybe you can plan the redesign in
> a way to make it possible? I would also participate in financing the
> development of these live templates.
>
> Andreas
>
>
>
> On 07.11.2014 20:10, Olivier Dalang wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>  I don't get the point in keeping the old classes if we upgrade the
> composers to layouts at opening ? Doesn't migration happen at XML level ?
>
>
>  Maybe while thinking about reworking the composer, we could think about
> a new feature : real templates (aka "masters" in Indesign).
>
>  All elements added to a "master" appear on all the page that apply it.
> This is very handy: you can always edit the master (move some elements,
> change the fonts/colors, etc.), and the changes are reflected on all the
> layouts. The challenging part from an UI point of view is the required
> ability to override the content of templates elements (for instance the
> extent of a map, the text of a textbox, etc.)
>
>  I thought of making a plugin for this, but got discouraged because of
> the problem you exposed... So it would be a good test case to see if the
> future API for the layouts allows to implement this easily ;)
>
>  Thanks !
>
>  Olivier
>
>
>
> 2014-11-07 16:26 GMT+01:00 Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net>:
>
>>  Hi Nyall,
>>
>> I also think that option 2 would work best. Option one would be very
>> confusing (I remember the days when we had two labeling versions, 2
>> symbology versions, etc. - awful!).
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Andreas
>>
>>
>> On 07.11.2014 16:16, G. Allegri wrote:
>>
>> Hi Nyall,
>> as I already told you privately, I agree with the second approach: remove
>> the current Composer and guarantee transparent auto-upgrade of existing
>> layouts in projects.
>> The improvements to the composer worth the effort, and the consequent
>> visual impact for users. The important thing is to guarantee old projects
>> to provide the same results (layouts) though, without re-designing them
>> from the ground.
>> Having both the old Composer and the new GUI tools would be misleading
>> and confusing to the users, and I imagine it would double the effort to
>> mantain both the tools.
>>
>>  giovanni
>>
>> 2014-11-07 12:37 GMT+01:00 Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm seeking feedback about the best way to move forward with QGIS' map
>>> composer. I'm currently running up against some large issues with the
>>> current design and API of composer which are holding back important
>>> features and fixes. Some of these issues include:
>>>
>>> - there's too much composer logic tied up in app and gui. This makes
>>> it very difficult for plugins to manipulate and export compositions
>>> without duplicating large blocks of code
>>> - there's too much item-specific logic and handling scattered through
>>> QgsComposition, QgsComposerView and QgsComposer. This makes it
>>> impossible to have features like plugin generated item types, and
>>> makes maintenance difficult.
>>> - everything is coded to expect measurements and sizes in mm. I can't
>>> (nicely) add support for other units without breaking api or resorting
>>> to a lot of hacks
>>> - same for mixed page sizes and orientations within a single
>>> composition, this requires an api break to implement cleanly
>>> - I need to totally break composer api in order to fix the instability
>>> in undo/redo commands (see http://hub.qgis.org/issues/11371)
>>> - QgsComposition should not require a QgsMapSettings/QgsMapRenderer.
>>> This should instead be set individually for map items. Doing so would
>>> pave the way for features such as reprojection support for individual
>>> map items.
>>> - the composer is full is deprecated methods and legacy api
>>>
>>> I've slowly come to the conclusion that the way forward is to move to
>>> a bunch of new classes, much like what was done with symbologyV2. If
>>> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/pull/9 passes then
>>> these would be named QgsLayout, QgsLayoutDesigner, etc. If not, well,
>>> I'll have to resort to QgsCompositionV2, etc.
>>>
>>> The potential problem with this approach is how to handle the GUI and
>>> existing projects. As far as I can see, there's a few options:
>>> 1. Expose both the existing composer and the new layout designer to
>>> users. Composers aren't automatically upgraded to layouts. This
>>> approach means that existing PyQgis code and plugins will still
>>> function for existing projects, but at the expense of a confusing
>>> experience for users.
>>> 2. Add all the new layout classes and keep the existing composer
>>> classes. Composer would NOT be exposed in the GUI and compositions are
>>> upgraded to layouts when projects are opened. This approach means that
>>> standalone python code would still operate, but plugins or code which
>>> are designed to be run from within QGIS would no longer function.
>>> 3. Move totally to the new layout classes and remove all composer
>>> classes (unlikely)
>>>
>>> I'm leaning toward option 2, but what are you thoughts? What's the
>>> best approach to move forward? Obviously I'll submit all this as a QEP
>>> when the plans are finalised, but for now I'm just after advice on the
>>> preferred approach.
>>>
>>> Nyall
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Qgis-developer mailing list
>>> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
>>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  --
>>  Giovanni Allegri
>> http://about.me/giovanniallegri
>> Twitter: https://twitter.com/_giohappy_
>> blog: http://blog.spaziogis.it
>> GEO+ geomatica in Italia http://bit.ly/GEOplus
>>
>>
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