52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

It is always difficult when you have sets of different overlapping rasters to visualize properly. Rasters are usualy a full coverage and so two rasters(or more) on top of each other block the view on one of them. As historically ILWIS is oriented towards rasters  I felt I had to offer more flexibility when displaying rasters. So what options do we have? Well basically three

1. Transparency. Make one layer (partially) transparent so you can view the “lower” layer
2. 3D Orientation. seperate the two layers in 3D space and view them there
3. Time shift. Quickly blink between layers to inspect different layers

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ILWIS has I believe 200+ distinct operations, quite a number of them are actually containers for a whole bunch of tightly related similar operations. For example MapFilter which is actually a collection several dozen seperate filter operations. So how many operations does ILWIS “realy” contain? I don’t know, it depends, as I have shown above, on how you count; quite a lot I suppose.

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One of the the things that has gotten a major overhaul in 3.8 is the way of how point maps are drawn. Before 3.8 it was a bit chaotic. You had multiple options there to drawn point maps with very different sets of attributes. For example, the “graph” drawing and the “true-type” drawing. For 3.8 I simplified the whole system and basically there is now only one way to draw points. As a consequence this means that there is only one set of attributes to change and that will work for all points of all types.

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Last week I finally got the go-ahead for something I have been planning to do for some time. It’s not in the 3.8, but a first alpha of it will probably (I hope 🙂 ) not be far behind it. What am I talking about? Well, about Python (the programming language) and ILWIS. The intention is to make a module that extends Python with Geo-functionality based on the ILWIS libaries. First I want to expose the data interface and calculator of ILWIS in some way and maybe after that the rendering of ILWIS maps (not sure about that yet).

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