Monday 6 April 2015

beePen: a tool for drawing freehand annotations in QGis

beePen is an experimental Python plugin for drawing freeand annotations and sketches in an ad-hoc layer in QGis. It is inspired by the corresponding tool in BeeGIS and re-use the code by Pavol Kapusta in his Frehand Editing plugin.

beePen allows to create an annotation layer, that is characterized by three fields, storing the user-defined width, color and transparency of the pen. These value are automatically inserted based on the user choice in the plugin window (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

To draw annotations, first you have to open the beePen window with the "bee" command (see Fig. 2, second icon from the right), eventually create a new annotation layer from the beePen window (see Fig. 1) or use an old one, put in edit mode using the standard tool of QGis (command at the left in Fig. 2) and then draw after selecting the pen tool (rightmost command in Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

The conception of beePen is by Mauro Dedonatis (Urbino Univ., Italy), while the implementation is by Mauro Alberti.