Some more sneak peeks into QGIS trunk

We will be going into feature freeze for QGIS 1.4 soon. There has been so much work going on in QGIS for this release, I thought I would take a moment to show the world what you might expect rendering-wise from the upcoming release.

Symbology-ng

The symbology-ng merge has brought in many improvements to the quality of cartography we can do in QGIS. Take a look at this first screenshot (click on it to get the full image):

In the previous incarnations of QGIS, in order to make this map I would have loaded the polygon layer for country boundaries three times. Each instance would have been given a border with a different thickness, so producing the black, grey, blue outline effect you can see in the image. With the new symbology infrastructure, one can now create a custome polygon symbol type that overpaints the lines numerous times. In the screenshot below you can see how the symbology for my countries was constructed.

The key here is the concept of ’symbol layers’. Each symbol layer can have its own fill, outline width and colour etc. They are drawn from bottom to top when the feature is rendered. The ’symbol levels’ button you can see in the background window in the above screenshot lets you dictate if the symbol layers are drawn per feature or for all the features in the view extent. If layers are drawn per feature, then you get something like the screenie below. If you draw symbol layers for all features in the view extent then the bottom most symbol layer is drawn for all features, then the next layer up and so on. This gives you an effect as shown in my first screenshot above.

Labelling

I’ve blogged before about the new labelling engine provided as a plugin for the upcoming 1.4 release. It will be a plugin because it does not yet support data driven label placement and a few other things that we need before it can become the default labelling engine.

In the screenshot above, you can see how neatly the engine places the town labels – none of them overlap and the result is quite a readable, easy on the eye map.

Map Composer

Another area of QGIS that has been receiving a lot of attention is the map composer. It now supports rotating maps, annotations with arrows and shapes and many other improvements. Unfortunately, the new labelling engine is not yet supported in the map composer, and the new symbology framework does not produce a proper legend in composer. We will see if and which of these limitations will be addressed for the 1.4 release. In the screenie below you can see some of the new features at work.