[Qgis-user] labelling by attribute

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi Jim,

On 20.06.2015 17:10, James Keener wrote:
>> 0.00xx percent of what ESRI has available in its budget.
> And have an amazing piece of software to show for it!

Thanks ;-) we try our best.
>> However, I agree with you, that rule-based or categorized labels would
>> be very useful to have in QGIS. In fact we know this for a long time
>> already - since version 2.0 people have asked for it. But - it is quite
>> a lot of work to implement. If you need this, consider sponsoring it or
>> start a crowd-funding initiative.
> There was talk in another email thread about doing something similar for
> AutoCAD support.

Yes - I will start working on a requirements document soon. I will post 
it on Google Docs so different people/organizations can contribute. In 
the case of DXF/DWG, Jürgen Fischer of company Norbit will be able to 
work on it. He also partially did the DXF export and knows the DXF 
format quite well. For the import we will probably use a library called 
Teigha - the same library also used by ESRI, Bricscad, Intergraph and 
many others. We will have to join the OpenDesignAlliance to get access 
to this library and pay a yearly membership fee - we still have to 
investigate which level of membership we need as an open source project. 
It is clear that the DWG import is harder than the DXF export, but the 
Teigha library will help a lot.

> In all seriousness, what would be the process of doing this?  Has this
> been done for any other QGIS features?  Who would be paid? OSG, specific
> developers?  Who would we talk to about something like this?

yes - absolutely - it has been done before. Maybe 2/3 of the recent new 
features were introduced because of paid development, and there has been 
some co-financed and/or crowd-funded development efforts. As an example, 
the DXF export was funded by 3 Swiss communities, the database relations 
and nested forms had been paid by some Swiss organizations. Many other, 
mostly middle-european local governments (e.g. Tuscany, french ministry 
of environment, Agence de l'eau Garonne, Province of Vorarlberg 
(Austria) ...) have contributed and funded as well.

Recently, there have been two successful crowd-funding initiatives:

* QGIS GRASS Plugin Upgrade Crowdfunding: 
http://www.gissula.eu/qgis-grass-plugin-crowdfunding/
* QGIS live layer effects: 
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/41633306/a-christmas-gift-for-qgis-live-layer-effects-for-q

The QGIS PSC will invest some efforts to help such crowd funding 
initiatives and make them more visible on our website, mailing lists and 
social media.

Besides the DWG import crowd funding effort, Nyall Dawson also plans to 
soon introduce a funding effort for print composer rewrite/improvements 
and a new reporting framework.

Andreas