QGIS 3.38.2

What's new in this version:

- The QGIS Project is proud to announce the release of QGIS 3.38 Grenoble, a landmark update brimming with advancements designed to empower users on their journey of spatial discovery. This release includes enhanced data filtering capabilities and the tight integration of filter criteria across different project elements, providing extended control to empower users in refining their data exploration processes.
- Various improvements have been provided for elevation management, including the new elevation controller as well as the ability to explicitly declare a vertical CRS for your project. Previous releases actively removed vertical CRS information for technical reasons, as outlined in QGIS Enhancement Proposal 267, however, this vital aspect of spatial data management is now being reintroduced to the QGIS project.
- Beyond these core improvements, QGIS 3.38 boasts a wealth of enhancements and quality-of-life improvements, including various usability enhancements, CMYK color support, improved search functionalities, and new features for data types such as DXF, Mesh, and SensorThings.
- QGIS is a community effort, and we would like to extend a big thank you to the developers, documenters, testers, and the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so) to make these releases possible. From the QGIS community, we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money, or otherwise contribute towards making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to QGIS.ORG and lend a hand!
- QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large or small to the project can be seen on our list of donors. If you would like to become an official project sustaining member, please visit our sustaining member page for more details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our regular developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure, and fund bug-fixing efforts. A complete list of current sponsors is provided below - our very thank you to all of our sponsors!
- QGIS is free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it - in fact, we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of their financial or social status - we believe that empowering people with spatial decision-making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

Temporal:
- Feature: New temporal mode: pixel value as temporal datetime
- A new temporal mode for raster layers is provided that interprets each pixel as a datetime value
- When rendering a raster layer using that temporal mode, pixels will be hidden whenever they fall outside of the temporal range attached to the render context.

Examples of some interesting temporal use cases include:
- representation of land use change such as forest loss
- representation of flooding over time
- representation of movement cost (e.g. GRASS’ r.walk)

Map Tools:
- Feature: Add Elevation Controller for filtering vertical data in 2d maps
- A new Elevation Controller provides users with the ability to filter vertical data in 2D maps, providing the equivalent experience of the temporal controller for elevation z-range slicing of data in line with QEP 201
- This feature is accessed through a new “Data Filtering” submenu in the View menu, along with new menu items for the Temporal Controller
- The controller shows as a range slider on the left of the map. There’s a configure action for setting the project’s elevation range, which dictates the range available from the widget.
- Feature: Add Z range support to map canvas / map settings items
- Elevation filtering is now supported in map canvases
- Feature: Add option to set a fixed elevation slice width for elevation controller
- A new option is provided on the configuration menu of the elevation controller, which allows for setting a fixed elevation slice width
- It can be used when a specific elevation range width is desired, or when the range should always be zero width

User Interface:
- Feature: Add search option for regular expression based searching
- A new optional regex mode has been exposed for advanced search options, as implemented in the updated search functionality for the code editor
- Feature: Data defined override: use middle-click to open the Expression Builder dialog window

Description:
- The middle-click on the Data defined override icon makes the Expression Builder dialog window open, as a convenient shortcut for right-clicking and then left-clicking on the Edit menu item

Symbology:
- Feature: New single color renderer for rasters
- A new single-color symbology has been added for raster layers. This allows for a super simple and friendly way to render a raster using a single color.
- Feature: Add support for Wind Barb rendering for mesh vector datasets
- Wind Barbs are a common way to display wind strength and direction on maps, and the new Wind Barb symbology type makes it easy for users to use this powerful visualization style for their mesh vector datasets
- Wind barbs encode the wind speed in knots (nautical miles per hour) so users must explicitly select the relevant data units for their data to display correctly, or use a custom multiplier to convert the value to knots

Labelling:
- Feature: Add maximum distance setting for point labels
- A new optional setting has been added for the “Around point” and “Cartographic” placement modes to specify the maximum distance of the labels from the feature. It’s used together with the existing distance setting to define a range of distances at which labels may be placed from their corresponding point features.
- This adds more flexibility to the placement of these layers, ultimately allowing for more labels to be placed on busy maps
- When the layer is set to the “around point” mode, then label candidates that are closer to the point will always be preferred over those that are further away
- When the layer is set to the “cartographic” mode, then the default behavior is also to prioritize closer labels. A new combo box allows users to control the priority, with an option for preferring position ordering. If this option is set, candidates at the corresponding positions (e.g. top left) are preferred, regardless of how far they are from the point, with the labeling falling back to alternate positions only when no labels can be placed up to the maximum label distance.
- Feature: Add ‘over point’ placement option for cartographic label mode
- A new option for label placement has been added for “O” = “over point” when the label placement mode is set to the “cartographic” mode
- When a feature’s data-defined placement priorities include this new ‘O’ option, a label can be placed directly over the corresponding point

Rendering:
- Feature: Add data defined control over heatmap radius and maximum value
- This allows users to define the radius and maximum as a value that makes sense for the current situation, e.g. the current map scale, current print atlas feature, or current temporal range
- This additionally includes the base changes required for data-defined properties at the feature renderer level, which may be useful for extending other vector renderer classes (e.g. point cluster/ displacement)

This feature was funded by Rubicon Concierge Real Estate Services:
- This feature was developed by Nyall Dawson

Print Layouts:
- Feature: Tab character support for QgsTextFormat and QgsTextRenderer
- A regression resulted in QGIS stripping tab characters and limiting the ability to use tab characters in certain contexts, such as performing character alignment in legends