| Quantum GIS Documentation Version 1.7.0 Wrocław Please read this entire document for important information about this release. You find a PDF manual of the current version on the QGIS website.

## Whats new in Version 1.7.0 'Wrocław'?

This release is named after the town of Wrocław in Poland. The Department of Climatology and Atmosphere Protection, University of Wrocław kindly hosted our developer meeting in November 2010. Please note that this is a release in our 'cutting edge' release series. As such it contains new features and extends the programmatic interface over QGIS 1.0.x and QGIS 1.6.0. As with any software, there may be bugs and issues that we were not able to fix in time for the release. We therefore recommend that you test this version before rolling it out en-masse to your users.

This release includes over 277 bug fixes and many new features and enhancements. Once again it is impossible to document everything here that has changed so we will just provide a bullet list of key new features here.

### Symbology labels and diagrams

- New symbology now used by default!
- Diagram system that uses the same smart placement system as labeling-ng
- Export and import of styles (symbology-ng).
- Labels for rules in rule-based renderers.
- Ability to set label distance in map units.
- Rotation for svg fills.
- Font marker can have an X,Y offset.
- Allow the line symbol layers to be used for outline of polygon (fill) symbols.
- Option to put marker on the central point of a line.
- Option to put marker only on first/last vertex of a line.
- Added \"centroid fill\" symbol layer which draws a marker on polygon's centroid.
- Allow the marker line symbol layer to draw markers on each vertex.
- Move/rotate/change label edit tools to interactively change data defined label properties.

### New Tools

- Added GUI for gdaldem.
- Added 'Lines to polygons' tool to vector menu.
- Added field calculator with functions like $x, $y and $perimeter.
- Added voronoi polygon tool to Vector menu.

### User interface updates

- Allow managing missing layers in a list.
- Zoom to group of layers.
- 'Tip of the day' on startup. You can en/disable tips in the options panel.
- Better organisation of menus, separate database menu added.
- Add ability to show number of features in legend classes. Accessible via right-click legend menu.
- General clean-ups and usability improvements.

### CRS Handling

- Show active crs in status bar.
- Assign layer CRS to project (in the legend context menu).
- Select default CRS for new projects.
- Allow setting CRS for multiple layers at once.
- Default to last selection when prompting for CRS.

### Rasters

- Added AND and OR operator for raster calculator
- On-the-fly reprojection of rasters added!
- Proper implementation of raster providers.
- Added raster toolbar with histogram stretch functions.

### Providers and Data Handling

- New SQLAnywhere vector provider.
- Table join support.
- Feature form updates:
  - Make NULL value string representation configurable.
  - Fix feature updates in feature form from attribute table.
  - Add support for NULL values in value maps (comboboxes).
  - Use layer names instead of ids in drop down list when loading value maps from layers.
  - Support feature form expression fields: line edits on the form which name prefix "expr_" are evaluated. Their value is interpreted as field calculator string and replaced with the calculated value.
- Support searching for NULL in attribute table.
- Attribute editing improvements:
  - Improved interactive attribute editing in table (adding/deleting features, attribute update).
  - Allow adding of geometryless features.
  - Fixed attribute undo/redo.
- Improved attribute handling:

- Optionally re-use entered attribute values for next digitized feature.
- Allow merging/assigning attribute values to a set of features.

- Allow OGR 'save as' without attributes (for eg. DGN/DXF).

### Api and Developer Centric

- Refactored attribute dialog calls to QgsFeatureAttribute.
- Added QgsVectorLayer::featureAdded signal.
- Layer menu function added.
- Added option to load c++ plugins from user specified directories. Requires application restart to activate.
- Completely new geometry checking tool for fTools. Significantly faster, more relevant error messages, and now supports zooming to errors. See the new QgsGeometry.validateGeometry function

### QGIS Mapserver

- Ability to specify wms service capabilities in the properties section of the project file (instead of wms_metadata.xml file).
- Support for wms printing with GetPrint-Request.

### Plugins

- Support for icons of plugins in the plugin manager dialog.
- Removed quickprint plugin - use easyprint plugin rather from plugin repo.
- Removed ogr convertor plugin - use 'save as' context menu rather.

### Printing

- Undo/Redo support for the print composer

## Whats new in Version 1.6.0 'Capiapó'?

Please note that this is a release in our 'cutting edge' release series. As such it contains new features and extends the programmatic interface over QGIS 1.0.x and QGIS 1.5.0. We recommend that you use this version over previous releases.

This release includes over 177 bug fixes and many new features and enhancements. Once again it is impossible to document everything here that has changed so we will just provide a bullet list of key new features here.

### General Improvements

- Added gpsd support to live gps tracking.
- A new plugin has been included that allows for offline editing.
- Field calculator will now insert NULL feature value in case of calculation error instead of stopping and reverting calculation for all features.
- Allow user specific PROJ.4 search paths and update srs.db to include grid reference.
- Added a native (C++) raster calculator implementation which can deal with large rasters efficiently.
- Improved interaction with extents widget in statusbar so that the text contents of the widget can be copied and pasted.
- Many improvements and new operators to the vector attribute table field calculator including field concatenation, row counter etc.
- Added --configpath option that overrides the default path (~/.qgis) for user configuration and forces QSettings to use this directory, too. This allows users to e.g. carry QGIS installation on a flash drive together with all plugins and settings.
- Experimental WFS-T support. Additionally ported wfs to network manager.
- Georeferencer has had many tidy ups and improvements.
- Support for long int in attribute dialog and editor.
- The QGIS Mapserver project has been incorporated into the main SVN repository and packages are being made available. QGIS Mapserver allows you to serve your QGIS project files via the OGC WMS protocol. Read More
- Select and measure toolbar flyouts and submenus.
- Support has been added for non-spatial tables (currently OGR, delimited text and PostgreSQL providers). These tables can be used for field lookups or just generally browsed and edited using the table view.
- Added search string support for feature ids ($id) and various other search related improvements.
- Added reload method to map layers and provider interface. Like this, caching providers (currently WMS and WFS) can synchronize with changes in the datasource.

### Table of contents (TOC) improvements

- Added a new option to the raster legend menu that will stretch the current layer using the min and max pixel values of the current extent.
- When writing shape files using the table of contents context menu's 'Save as' option, you can now specify OGR creation options.
- In the table of contents, it is now possible to select and remove several layers at once.

### Labelling (New generation only)

- Data defined label position in labeling-ng.
- Line wrapping, data defined font and buffer settings for labeling-ng.

### Layer properties and symbology

- Three new classification modes added to graduated symbol renderer (version 2), including Natural Breaks (Jenks), Standard Deviations, and Pretty Breaks (based on pretty from the R statistical environment). Read More
- Improved loading speed of the symbol properties dialog.
- Data-defined rotation and size for categorized and graduated renderer (symbology-ng).
- Use size scale also for line symbols to modify line width.
- Replaced raster histogram implementation with one based on Qwt. Added option to save histogram as image file. Show actual pixel values on x axis of raster histogram.
- Added ability to interactively select pixels from the canvas to populate the transparency table in the raster layer properties dialog.
- Allow creation of color ramps in vector color ramp combo box.
- Added "style manager..." button to symbol selector so that users will find the style manager more easily.

### Map Composer

- add capability to show and manipulate composer item width/ height in item position dialog.
- Composer items can now be deleted with the backspace key.
- Sorting for composer attribute table (several columns and ascending / descending).

## Whats new in Version 1.5.0?

Please note that this is a release in our 'cutting edge' release series. As such it contains new features and extends the programmatic interface over QGIS 1.0.x and QGIS 1.4.0. If an unchanging user interface, programmatic API and long term support is more important to you then cool new and untested features, we recommend that you use a copy of QGIS from our Long Term Support (LTS)1.0.x release series. In all other cases we recommend that you use this version.

This release includes over 350 bug fixes, over 40 new features. Once again it is impossible to document everything here that has changed so we will just provide a bullet list of key new features here.

### Main GUI

- There is a new angle measuring tool that allows you to interactively measure angles against the map backdrop.
- Live GPS Tracking tool
- User configurable WMS search server
- Allow editing of invalid geometry in node tool
- Choice between mm and map units for new symbology. Scaling to use new symbology in print composer as well
- SVG fill symbol layer for polygon textures
- Font marker symbol layer
- Added --noplugins command line options to avoid restoring the plugins. Useful when a plugin misbehaves and causes QGIS to crash during startup
- Allow hiding of deprecated CRSes
- Add point displacement renderer plugin - allows points to be shifted to avoid colliding with other points
- Allow saving vector layers as ogr vector files
- Raster provider: reduce debugging noise
- Allow adding parts to multi points and lines
- Text and form annotation tools are now in gui and app
- Added possibility to place a set of default composer templates in pkgDataPath/composer_templates
- Gradient color ramps now support multiple stops - for adding intermediate colors
- Center map if user clicks into the map
- New plugin for carrying out spatial selections
- Data-defined size and rotation for single symbol renderer in symbology-ng
- IdentifyAsHtml to raster layer and use it in identify
- Export legend groups and layers with legendinterface and use this information to display groups in the composer legend.
- Show selected feature count in status bar
- Query option added to layer menu to subset vector layers
- Option to label only selected features (on the 'old' labelling tool)
- Load/save queries created in the query builder.
- Manual adding of categories in symbology-ng.
- Georeferencer: possibility to configure if residuals should be showed in pixels or map units
- Delimited text provider: allow empty values in numeric columns
- Added rule-based renderer for symbology-ng
- Ability to create spatial lite databases from within QGIS
- Inclusion of GDAL Raster tools plugin into QGIS core
- New python console (with history)
- Add validation to capture tool
- Allow postgres layers without saved username & password by asking for credentials
- Support NULL values in search strings
- Optionally add new layers to the selected group
- Map composer can add attribute Tables in layouts. It is possibile to show only visible features in composer table or all features
- Identify tool attribute form now non-modal in view mode (since r12796)
- Identified features' highlight disappear when window is deactivate or closed and reappears when reactivated.

### WMS and WMS-C Support

- WMS-C support, new spatial authorities, wms selection improvements
- Resolved EPSG dependency in spatial reference systems and included french IGNF definitions in srs.db
- WWM provider makes requests asynchronously through QNetworkAccessManager now
- WMS selection allows inserting of all layers of a branch
- WMS has support for more mime types
- Added load/save to WMS dialog
- WMS-C scale slider gui added and more selection improvements

### API Updates

- QgsDataProvider & QgsMapLayer: add dataChanged() signal, so that a provider can signal that the datasource changed
- Use QNetworkAccessManager instead of QgsHttpTransaction (including caching and dynamic authentication to website and proxies)
- Allow opening layer properties from plugins
- Support for custom plugin layers.
- Allow refreshing of plugins programmatically
- Support for custom plugin directories using QGIS_PLUGINPATH environment variables. More paths can be passed, separated by semicolon.
- Legend interface added to retrieve layers in legend order
- Support more GEOS operators

## Whats new in Version 1.4.0 'Enceladus'?

Please note that this is a release in our 'cutting edge' release series. As such it contains new features and extends the programmatic interface over QGIS 1.0.x and QGIS 1.3.0. If an unchanging user interface, programmatic API and long term support is more important to you then cool new and untested features, we recommend that you use a copy of QGIS from our Long Term Support (LTS)1.0.x release series. In all other cases we recommend that you use this version.

This release includes around 200 bug fixes, nearly 30 new features and has had a lot of love and attention poured in to it to take our favourite desktop GIS application another step on the road to GIS nirvana! So much has happened in the 3 months since our last release that it is impossible to document everything here. Instead we will just highlight a couple of important new features for you.

Probably the biggest new feature is the addition of the new vector symbology infrastructure. This is provided alongside the old implementation - you can switch using a button in the vector layer properties dialog. It does't replace the old symbology implementation completely yet because there are various isues that need to be resolved and a large amount of testinhen it is considered ready.

QGIS now has a field calculator, accessible via a button in the attribute section of the vector properties, and from the attribute table user interface. You can use feature length, feature area, string concatenation and type conversions in the field calculator, as well as field values.

The map composer has had a lot of attention. A grid can now be added to composer maps. Composer maps can now be rotated in the layout. The limitation of a single map layout per project has been removed. A new composer manager dialog has been added to manage the existing composer instances. The composer widget property sheets have been completely overhauled to use less screen space

Various parts of the user interface have been overhauled with the goal of improving consistency and to improve support for netbooks and other smaller screen devices. Loading and saving of shortcuts. Position can now be displayed as Degrees, Minutes, Seconds in the status bar. The add, move and delete vertex buttons are now removed and the node tool is moved from the advanced editing toolbar to the standard editing toolbar. The identification tool has also undergone numerous improvements.

A render caching capability has been added to QGIS. This speeds up common operations such as layer re-ordering, changing symbology, WMS / WFS client, hiding / showing layers and opens the door for future enhancements such as threaded rendering and pre-compositing layer cache manipulation. Note that it is disabled by default, and can be enabled in the options dialog.

User defined SVG search paths are now added to the options dialog.

When creating a new shapefile, you can now specify its CRS. Also the avoid intersections option for polygons is now also possible with background layers.

For power users, you can now create customizable attribute forms using Qt Designer dialog UIs.

## Whats new in Version 1.3.0 'Mimas'?

This release includes over 30 bug fixes and several useful new features:

OSM plugin & provider updates:

- new OSM style files.
- new icons.
- dialog text updated and completed.
- "Saving OSM into file" functionality was improvements.
- fixed some problems with encoding... ascii to utf-8.
- all OSM layers are automatically removed after disabling OSM plugin in plugin manager.
- other OSM related bugfixes.

Other notable features and improvements in this release

- Marker size is now configurable when editing a layer.
- Incorporation of the analysis library into the mainstream release.
- Identify features across multiple layers.
- Added a new plugin for carrying out raster terrain analysis (computing slope aspect, steepness etc).
- A reshape tool to apply to line/polygon geometries. The part of a geometry between the first and last intersection of the reshape line will be replaced.
- Added snapping to current layer in measure dialog.
- Added ability to select the primary key for views.
- Zoom to a coordinate by entering it in the status bar coordinate display.

## Whats new in Version 1.2.0?

This release includes over 140 bug fixes and enhancements over the QGIS 1.1.0 release. In addition we have added the following new features:

    Editing:

    Editing functionality in QGIS has had a major update in this release. This
    includes the addition of new vector editing tools:

    - delete part of multipart feature
    - delete hole from polygon
    - simplify feature
    - Added a new "node" tool (in advanced digitizing toolbar).
    - New functionality for merging features
    - Added undo/redo functionality for vector layer editing.
    - Added option to show only markers of selected features in editing mode.
    - Change layer's icon in legend to reflext that the layer is editable.

    In addition, there are undo/redo actions in Edit menu, in Advanced digitizing toolbar
    and there is a new dock widget displaying undo stack of active layer.

    About the node tool: It resembles a tool for editing paths by nodes that is
    present in every vector editor. How does it work (in QGIS)? Click on a
    feature, its nodes will be marked by small rectangles. Clicking and dragging a
    node moves it. Double clicking a segment will add a new node. Pressing delete
    key will remove active node. It's possible to select more active nodes at
    once: by clicking and dragging a rectangle. It's possible to select a segment's
    adjacent nodes by clicking on the segment. It's possible to add/remove active
    nodes by using Ctrl when clicking a node or dragging a rectangle

    We recommend that you turn off vertex markers in QGIS options when working with
    this tool: the redraws are much faster and the map is not cluttered with
    markers.

    Keyboard shortcuts:

    New feature: configure shortcuts for actions within main window of qgis!
    See menu Setting->Configure shortcuts

    Map Composer:

    It is now possible to lock/unlock composer item positions by right mouse click.
    The width and height of the composer map will now remain fixed if user sets the
    composer map extent to the map canvas extent. possibility to display
    current date in composer label by typing (d 'June' yyyy) or similar.
    It is now possible to keep the current layers in a composer map even if further
    layers are added to the main map. Export to PDF in composer is now possible.

    Attribute tables:

    It is now possible to search the attribute table within selected records only.
    General speedups have been made on the attribute table. Setting of field width
    and precision when adding attributes is now possible. Handling of attribute
    types in WFS provider has bee improved.

    Attribute aliases for vector layers are now available. The aliases are shown
    instead of the original field names in the info tool and attribute table to
    make things easier for end users. There is now a GUI for setting edit widgets
    for layer attributes.  A new dialog allows loading a value map from a layer
    (could be non-spatial table too!).  The edit widgets settings will also now
    be respected in the attribute table.

    Plugins:

    - The order of layers in the WMS dialog can now be changed.
    - The eVis plugin, version 1.1.0, has been added to the QGIS project and
      included as a standard plugin. More information about eVis can be found here:
      http://biodiversityinformatics.amnh.org/open_source/evis/documentation.php .
    - The interpolation plugin now has the ability to use line layers as constrains
      for triangulation in interpolation plugin. You can also now save the
      triangulation to shape file.
    - An new OpenStreetMap provider and plugin have been added to QGIS.

    Projects Management:

    QGIS now includes support for  project relative position of file data sources
    and svgs. The saving of relative paths of file data sources is optional.

    PostGIS & the PostgreSQL Provider:

    You can now select the SSL mode when adding a new DB connection. Turning off
    SSL encryption can greatly improve performance of PostGIS data loading where
    connection security is not required. Support has been added for more native
    types and for setting of column comments.

    Symbology enhancements:

    - allow refresh of symbols via popup menu on the renderer's symbol selection
    - add support for data defined symbol(name)s
    - add support for font symbol markers (only data defined - no gui yet)
    - add symbol size in map units (ie. symbols that keep the size in mapunits
      independent of the mapscale)

    Command line arguments:

    Added command line argument support on windows.
    Enhancement of command line arguments:
    - allow given snapshot sizes
    - allow suppression of splash screen
    - capture map decorations from plugins on snapshots

    Grass:

    There is a new GRASS shell. Also there have been many cleanups and consistency
    updates.

## Whats new in Version 1.1.0?

This release includes many bug fixes and enchancements over the QGIS 1.0.0 release. In addition we have added the following new features:

- Updates to translations.
- Improvements and polishing of the Python plugin installer. Switch to the new official QGIS repository.
- Improvements to themes so that plugins and other parts of the GUI are better supported when switching themes. Addition of the new GIS icon theme.
- Improvements to Debian packaging to better support Debian standard requirements.
- Support usb: as a GPS device under Linux.
- WMS plugin now supports sorting and shows nested layers as a tree. WMS provider also support 24bit png images now. The WMS plugin also now provides a search interface for finding WMS servers.
- Added svg point symbols symbols from Matt Amos (with his permission).
- Improvements to proxy support and support of proxy in WFS provider. The WFS provider now also shows progress information as it is fetching data.
- Improvements the PostGIS client support. Massive speedups in PostGIS layer rendering can now be achieved by disabling SSL in the connection editor.
- Mapserver Export improvements for continuous color support.
- Added tools menu - the fTools plugins are now part of the core QGIS plugins and will always be installed by default.
- Improvements to the print composer including object alignment options. It is also now possible to print maps as postcript raster or vector. For python programmers, the composer classes now have python bindings.
- When using File - Save as image, the saved image is now georeferenced.
- Projection selector now includes quick selection of recently used CRS's.
- Continuous color renderer supports point symbols now too.
- Improved CMake support for building against dependencies from OSGEO4W (Windows only). Addition of an XCode project of developers building under OSX.
- Updates and cleanups to the GRASS toolbox.
- Changes in open vector dialog to support all drivers available in ogr including database and protocol drivers. This brings with it support for SDE, Oracle Spatial, ESRI personal geodatabase and many more OGR supported data stores. Note that in some cases accessing these may require third party libraries to be on your system.
- The middle mouse button can now be used for panning.
- A new, faster attribute table implementation.
- Numerous cleanups to the user interface.
- A new provider was added for spatiallite - a geodatabase-in-a-file implementation based on the SQLITE database.
- Vector overlay support that can draw pie and bar charts over vector layers based on attribute data.

## Whats new in Version 1.0.0?

This release includes over 265 bug fixes and enchancements over the QGIS 0.11.0 release. In addition we have added the following new features:

- HIG Compliance improvements for Windows / Mac OS X / KDE / Gnome
- Saving a vector layer or subset of that layer to disk with a different Coordinate Reference System to the original.
- Advanced topological editing of vector data.
- Single click selection of vector features.
- Many improvements to raster rendering and support for building pyramids external to the raster file.
- Overhaul of the map composer for much improved printing support.
- A new 'coordinate capture' plugin was added that lets you click on the map and then cut & paste the coordinates to and from the clipboard
- A new plugin for converting between OGR supported formats was added.
- A new plugin for converting from DXF files to shapefiles was added.
- A new plugin was added for interpolating point features into ASCII grid layers.
- The python plugin installer was completely overhauled, the new version having many improvements, including checking that the version of QGIS running will support a plugin that is being installed.
- Plugin toolbar positions are now correctly saved when the application is closed.
- In the WMS client, WMS standards support has been improved.
- Complete API revision - we now have a stable API following well defined naming conventions.
- Ported all GDAL/OGR and GEOS usage to use C APIs only.

Special Requirements

- Qt 4.3.0 is required.
- The Expat XML Parser is required for the GPS plugin. This vastly improves the speed and memory management when loading GPX files.
- The raster georeferencer plugin requires the GNU Scientfic Library (GSL).

GSL and Expat are optional and required only if you want to use the georeferencer or GPS plugins respectively. SQLite is always required.

Known Issues in this Release
  General
  - Some internationalization (translation) files may be incomplete.
  - QGIS is not bug free - we make no assertions as to its fitness for use for any particular purpose. Use entirely at your own risk.
  OS X Specific
  - Due to a limitation in the Quicktime graphics engine, there is a limit on the number points allowed per feature. See the Readme that comes with the OS X dmg
  Windows
  - GRASS included with windows build is from : GRASS 6.3

Reporting Bugs
  If think you have found a bug, please consider reporting it to the development team. The steps to report a bug are:
  1. Ensure you have an OSGEO login (available to anyone by filling out the form on this page: http://www.osgeo.org/osgeo_userid
  2. Go to the Bug Tracker at http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis
  3. Review the list of current issues to make sure your bug has not already been submitted. If it has, review the submission and see if there is anything you can add to the bug report to aid the developers
  4. If your bug has not been reported, create a new ticket. Tickets lacking contact information are subject to deletion.

User, Installation and Coding Guide
  The QGIS manual is the definitive guide to using QGIS including installation and coding instructions (be sure to read this!). A current version of the QGIS manual and translations are provided at http://qgis.osgeo.org/en/documentation/manuals.html. Older versions are available at http://download.osgeo.org/qgis/doc/manual/."