If you’ve been keeping up – QGIS is quite a bit of fun to work with. Probably my biggest complaint was the cartography and that complaint shrinks with every release.
Nyall Dawson , a guy who seems to spear head a lot of the cartographic end of life, is running a kickstarter campaign. I’m going to be lazy and just copy and paste from the kick starter site:
QGIS is an open source GIS system, well regarded for its extensive feature set and active development community. QGIS has fantastic cartographic abilities – it’s got a huge range of symbology styles and options which can be used to style your maps. But there’s more we can do to push this even further…
One long requested cartographic feature has been for live drop shadows on layers. Why stop there? Why not inner and outer glow effects and live blur effects? Just imagine the cartographic possibilities if this functionality was available from within a GIS, and didn’t require exporting maps to external editors!
What I’ll deliver
- A framework for adding live layer effects to QGIS
- Initially, effects will only be used for symbols (including point, line and polygon symbols). But, the proposed framework will be flexible enough to be added to other areas of QGIS in future (eg, composer items and labelling).
- Adding a basic set of effects – including blur, drop shadow and outer glows.
- All the dry (but important) stuff – unit tests, python bindings, API docs.
Why crowdfund?
While I’ve got proof of concept code working, there’s a lot still to do before this work is suitable for merging into the master QGIS codebase:
- GUI for adding and modifying effects
- Plugin architecture so that layer effects can be written in python and implemented via QGIS plugins
- Unit tests
This work is quite tedious and time consuming, and requires funded development time in order for me to complete.
