[Marble-devel] Routing in marble

[Arnd Baecker]

Hi,

thanks a lot for the update - overall it works very fine!

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Dennis Nienhüser wrote:

> On 14.04.2010 20:33, Arnd Baecker wrote:

>> c) The button to remove a point might be better positioned next to the
>>      label: the reason is that usually (at least on small screens) only
>>      a part of left side bar is visible, so that the
>>      button to remove a point can only be reached after scrolling.
>>
> Hm, I'm concerned that this will lead to people accidentally triggering
> it. Points can also be removed using the context menu now, I think
> that's how it'd be used most often.

Works fine as it is now (and it indeed your concern seems
valid to me as well).

Some more comments:
- Initially one now has two Mouse-Pointer Icons, but no A and B
   anymore. Somehow I found the A and B a good indication.
- Also later on,  I miss the pointer next to the label a bit,
   as it easily allowed to start from a new place (which might
   be "far" away from the original A, i.e. further away than
   would be easily possible by dragging the original A).
- when the Mouse-Pointer Icon is selected,
   zooming in and out with the middle-mouse button pressed
   and moving up/down is not possible.
- For path segments which go back-and-forth (eg a dead-end),
   there is no right-mouse menu and also no possibility
   to add a point. I think it should be possible to also drag
   a point away from this line. One possibility which seems
   reasonable to me is that it should be added in the
   segment which is further away from the start
- when clicking on one of the "rtept" a pop-up window
   displays the instruction ("turn left/right" etc."
   at that point - very nice. But how can one get rid of
   that window again (I tried to click on the point again or
   within the window)?
- dragging of these points to a different place should be possible
   as well.
- The most crucial point to me is the one mentioned in one of my
   previous mails  which we already discussed a bit on the IRC:

      Imagine a connection A-B-C which geometrically leads
      to something like a half-circle.
      Now I would like to add an additional point between A and B,
      by dragging via the mouse. If this additional point
      is placed closer to the connection between B-C
      than the one between A-B
      one gets (in terms of the old A, B, C): A-B-Newpoint-C.
      However, I would have expected A-Newpoint-B-C,
      i.e. the new point should be inserted in the list of points
      between A and B  and not between the geometrically closest points.
      ((Side remark: If one thinks of adding a new point somewhere
      using a mouse-click, the current approach seems correct,
      but not for modifying a segment between two points, at least IMO)).

   To solve this, one somehow has to figure out from which segment
   the point was dragged away. Then the new via point just has to be
   inserted in between these two elements.
   One approach to find the place in the list of via-points could be
   as follows:
   a) Determine the corresponding closest line segment
      along the waypoints.
      (Here the distance between the point and all line segments
      has to be used, as for sharp bends of the route wrong
      associations could happen).
   b) Then one has to find the two closest via-points along the route.
      You pointed out that waypoints and via points are stored
      in two independent lists. So for each via-point one could
      attach the corresponding label to the closest point of
      the closest route segment (sorry, sounds complicated,
      but this seems necessary to get the right association ... ;-).

      With this preparation, one just has to go backward in the list of
      waypoints from the line segment found in a) to find the
      previous via-point and forward to find the next via-point.

- Exporting to a gpx file seems to work fine, though for some reason
   it takes quite a while until the "Export Route" dialogue
   comes up.
   On the konsole I see
     kdeinit4: Got EXEC_NEW 'kio_trash' from launcher.
     kdeinit4: preparing to launch
     kio_trash(25952) TrashImpl::init: initialization OK, home trash dir: 
"/home/aba/.local/share/Trash"
     kio_trash(25952) TrashProtocol::listDir: listdir:  KUrl("trash:/")
     kio_trash(25952) TrashImpl::infoForFile: 0   "IMG_62991.JPG"
   and many more lines like the last one.
- Concerning the exported file:
   Trying to display it using prune, I get
   "Error reading file: Invalid byte 2 of a 2-byte UTF-8 sequence"
   The culprits are rtept entries with \"a, \"o, \ss etc.

- Minor point: For the resulting file, one gets a line
  "</trkseg></trk><rte>", where a line break after the </trk>  would
   be nice.

Removing points works fine via the right-mouse menu - very nice!

Thanks a lot, routing with saving its result is
(at least for me) a very important feature!!

Best, Arnd