Hi Richard,
Thanks for the clarification. No rudeness parsed. :-) Apologies, I
should be clearer.
One of QGIS' biggest weaknesses IMHO is usability; a lot of progress has
been made in this area, but it's an area that still needs work. The SVG
icons are one such area, and while the Resources Plugin may technically
provide a potential solution to this problem (i.e. just port over the
Font-Awesome SVGs into the plugin), it:
a) doesn't solve any of the issues I raised
b) makes some of them worse. Now even more duplicate SVGs! The red cross
one adds yet another cross for example, on top of the 5 identical ones
already in the core, (and there's the simple marker too of course..)).
And that's literally the first random one I picked.
c) introduces new issues. i.e.: unhelpful metadata "This collection
contains SVGs by GIS LAB" (sorry for picking on you, not the only ones
;-) ).
> Please try Faunalia's 'Distance Measurement Styles'. One click and it
will be available for you.
Impressive. The Resources Plugin seems to me better suited to solving a
different problem, though if I may provide some feedback: It took me a
good minute or two to figure out how to access these styles once I'd
downloaded them. (Found a bug too, but I'll open an issue for that :-) ).
> But as Saber proposes: please create a QEP so there can be some
centralized discussion.
Is it the way to go? The blurb for QEPs says: "Generally smaller
features do not require a QEP unless they can have large knock on
effect." - looking at them, most of them are large chunks of dev work,
and the rest are for project admin. Conversely, this is a couple tiny
dev features (though I am making assumptions about the QGIS dev base...
;-) ), and a small chunk of admin work.
Further thought (and an issue with QEPs in general): QEPs as Issues
(which are Pull-based) are not very visible compared to the list (which
is push-based). As in I'd expect barely anyone outside of project devs
are likely to ever go trawling through the QEP issue tracker (i.e. I
never have), whereas everyone on the list will get emails even if the
chose not to read them.
I mean it's easy enough to do; mostly just copy/past my previous email.
But I see it reducing the audience for the conversation and not adding
anything.
Cheers,
Jonathan
On 2020-07-27 14:03, Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
Hi Jonathan,
I do not want to sound rude, but I think you really underestimate the
possibilities and complexity of the icons and QGIS styling and styling
resources in general.
About the 'Resource Sharing Plugin':
- styling (of points) is never only about the little icon. styling and symbols
are complex beasts. If you google the plugins QEP, you will see that it (also)
started of as a 'simple todo' but ended up in current form
- did you have a look: because there are a LOT of styling resources already: simple
ones (like mine with actually only some icons), but others giving you the
capabilities to show all dimension labels and arrows of your geometries, and again
others very specific for a certain working area: oil&gas icons, Red Cross-map
icons etc etc
I'd be OK with cleaning up, but a good thing on the Resource Plugin is that it
fetches a (online, be it on github or on you webserver!) set of styling
resources: symbols, styles, icons, colors, whatever is possible. Please try
Faunalia's 'Distance Measurement Styles'. One click and it will be available
for you.
About metadata and searching: cool, would also be nice if that could work for
Resources. Isn't there some kind of SVG-standard for this?
About all in one directory: fine, or at least for the ones QGIS gives you upon
install (the 'App' folder). But I also like the way the Resource plugin orders
them in folders (see screenshot).
But as Saber proposes: please create a QEP so there can be some centralized
discussion.
Regards,
Richard Duivenvoorde
On 7/27/20 1:42 PM, Jonathan Moules wrote:
Hi List,
The more I look at the current SVG icons, the more I'm thinking it really needs
some TLC (Tender Loving Care). As far as I can tell, icons are categorised by
the directory they're in, so if you want an icon to appear in two categories,
you put the icon in there twice... and so that's just what has happened! I
suspect the current set has simply accreted over time.
Examples of weirdnesses:
* The "food" and "entertainment" categories are basically identical, but have
different icons for the same thing.
* There are at least 7 near-identical aeroplane icons(!)
* There's cycle parking and cycle locking, but no cycle? No car (that's under "gpsicons")
but two taxis? Oh, and 5 (five!) aeroplanes to choose from, and multiple types of train. And that's
just "transport".
* "Shopping" has a hammer and a pawprint in it... well, I mean, you can buy
those things sure, but that seems like a rather odd place to put them.
* "landmark" seems to basically be a subset of "religion", with a museum and a weird icon
for a "school" thrown in for good measure.
I'm sure there are many more.
Given the importance of a good symbol library for cartography, this seems like a fairly
significant issue, but fortunately it's pretty "easy" to fix (compared to
writing a data processing algorithm anyway ;-) ).
My thoughts:
* Move the svg's into a single directory. (Though would break any current
projects symbology using them I guess?)
* Use a metadata file to categorise them, so you get a list of categories as
now and a single symbol can be in multiple categories.
* Add a search feature so the user can quickly find "museum" without having to
guess where it has been categorised.
* Clean up the current symbols by removing duplicates.
* Add the font-awesome symbols (per my thread on the User List) to fill in the
gaps and flesh out the collection. As a bonus, it comes with metadata for
categories and search terms (YAML files).
* bonus - metadata is internationalised so "museo" (IT), "muzeu" (RO), etc
would also work for finding that museum.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Jonathan
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