QGIS has seen a large amount of new functions and improvements during the last few years. And there is still more to come. This presentation shows the most recent changes and new functionalities in the codebase after version 2.8, both from a users and from a technical point of view: Curved geometries have long been a missed feature in FOSSGIS Desktop solutions, with such geometries usually ending up being segmented on import. A rewrite of the QGIS Geometry core now allows for native support of a number of curved geometry types, such as CircularString, CompoundCurve, CurvePolygon, etc., in addition to the traditionally supported Point, Line and Polygon geometries. As part of the redesign, proper support for M and Z coordinate values was also implemented for all supported types. Geometry errors can easily sneak into large datasets, either because of inexact data acquistion, but also due to gradual loss of precision when importing, exporting and converting the datasets to different formats. Manually detecting and fixing such issues can be very time consuming. To assist users confronted with such problems, the 'Geometry checker' has been developed. It provides the functionality to test a dataset for geometry and topology issues (such as duplicate nodes, overlaps, gaps, etc), presenting a list of detected faults. For each error type, the plugin offers one more more methods to automatically fix the issue. A third new function in the geometry domain is the snapper plugin. It allows to automatically align the boundaries of a layer to a background layer (e.g. align the parcel boundaries with a road background layer). |