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Riverscapes / QRAVEPlugin

QGIS Plugin for viewing Riverscapes projects
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Change default projection for first layer added to map from RAVE #39

Open joewheaton opened 2 years ago

joewheaton commented 2 years ago

Downside of a smart feature/choice

For these new production grade network tools (e.g. VBET, sqlBRAT) weare deliberately doing everything in GCS_WGS_1984 so that it works anywhere in world. This is in part because many watersheds or HUCs span multipe UTM zones. @philipbaileynar is super careful that parameters are still in m and we convert on the fly.

ArcGIS in a new map will automatically change the Data Frame's display projection to that of the first layer that gets added. If first layer added is a Basemap, it just sticks with GCS_WGS_1984 (ie. non-projected lat-long with lots of distortion in higher lattitudes). If first layer added is from a Riverscapes project like one of ours, it will also be GCS_WGS_1984.

The downside is this looks distorted and ugly. image

The Manual Fix is Easy - Change to an appropriate projected coordinate system

So here I could use UTM Zones 10, 11 or 12. If I use 11: image

Request a Feature to Change Display Coordinate System to Nearest UTM Zone

When a user adds a layer from a riverscapes project in RAVE to a map with an empty table of contents, it looks at center of extents of dataset being added, and grabs the nearest UTM Zone, and then uses that for the display coordinate system. For 95% of users, this will just look "correct" and for the few power users that are annoyed, they can turn it off or override.

I would request that this feature that is on by default, but can be turned off in RAVE options.

This is same as ArcRAVE issue: https://github.com/Riverscapes/RaveAddIn/issues/39

joewheaton commented 1 year ago

@philipbaileynar I want to raise this issue again. This is an easy fix and I think would be really helpful. I find myself every time wanting to change to the nearest WGS84 UTM zone to go to a standard metric projection system for where my project is instead of just geographic coordinate system.

It strikes me that maybe a better thing would be to add this to the "Options" menu and by deafult it is checked to "When adding Riverscape Project to an empty map, reassign CRS in QGIS Project Properties from WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) to closest WGS 84 / UTM Zone as appropriate".