In cartography, it is a frequent operation to set labels to fixed positions, together with the position of the fix point (left/middle/right, Top, Half, Bottom) that is kept constant in case of font change, rotation or zoom. Therefore, three new editing tools to manipulate text labels are now in the QGIS developer version: the move label tool drags text labels to a new position the rotate label tool is for interactive rotation of labels the label property tools opens a dialog that lets the user manipulate the data defined properties of a label (and also the text of the label attribute) All three tools work on the new labeling engine and data defined labeling needs to be enabled for the layer (e. Read on

The Sunday night session of the QGIS hackfest resulted in a new release of the Mapfile Tools plugin. This QGIS plugin allows you to display an UMN Mapserver mapfile in QGIS without running a Mapserver instance. It depends only on Mapscript (apt-get install python-mapscript on Debian/Ubuntu) and allows you to zoom and pan on the mapfile layer. In release 0.6, an output window has been added, which shows error messages and detailed layer information. Read on

Marco, Matthias and me spent three days at the QGIS hackfest in Wroclaw (pictures). There I got the time to work on the QGIS globe plugin and made a presentation of the current state. As soon as the threading branch (Martin Dobias’ Google of Summer project) is merged into trunk, the globe should make its way into trunk as well. In the meantime you can compile the QGIS branch from guthub to test the globe. Read on

For data collection, it is a common situation to work with a laptop or a phone offline in the field. Upon returning to the network, the changes need to be synchronized with the master data source, e.g. a PostGIS database. If several persons are working simultaneously on the same datasets, it is difficult to merge the edits by hand, even if people don’t change the same features. Therefore, Mathias Walker implemented an offline plugin for QGIS. Read on

Recently I had to pre-select a Node inside a TreePanel ExtJS widget. I tried many ways but failed because most of the time when I tried to: node.select(); that node would not yet be rendered into the browser’s DOM and so the select would fail somewhere inside the extjs.js blob with something like "this ... undefined ...". What I needed was a "rendered" event, but there doesn’t seem to be such an event for neither TreePanel not TreeNode or any of their superclasses. Read on