[Qgis-user] Can we make QGIS stop lying?

[Tobias Wendorff]

Hi there!

Yesterday, I gave an introductory workshop at University on
how to download OSM-data off its website and work on it in QGIS.
The students are in master's degree now and learned ArcGIS in
their study runs only. So we have to make QGIS tasty to them.

I've explained the students, how to switch to a metric projection
(EPSG:25832) instead of the geographical one (EPSG:4326). Then
we've filtered out shops

Then the students should filter out all the shops in their hometown
and calculate the airlining distance to their flat. I've used hub
lines for this. The dialog informs about distance in meters.

It's a lie. The resulting distance is in decimal degrees. So 600
meters ere about 0.1 [whatever]. Of course, it's easy to calculate
the real distance using "$length" in field calculator, but why?!

QGIS functions should detect that coordinates are in geographic
projections and should inform that the result isn't metric OR
switch to a processing system, which gives metric results. There
are many libraries, which can calculate VERY accurate and quick
on ellipsoids. With less than 0.01 mm of errors.

Most of us might be aware that's normal behavior in QGIS, but
most of new users will not be aware that meters in GUI aren't
meters and dataset.

Best regards,
Tobias