Book Image

QGIS Quick Start Guide

By : Andrew Cutts
Book Image

QGIS Quick Start Guide

By: Andrew Cutts

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user friendly, open source geographic information system (GIS). The popularity of open source GIS and QGIS, in particular, has been growing rapidly over the last few years. This book is designed to help beginners learn about all the tools required to use QGIS 3.4. This book will provide you with clear, step-by-step instructions to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. You begin with an overview of QGIS 3.4 and its installation. You will learn how to load existing spatial data and create vector data from scratch. You will then be creating styles and labels for maps. The final two chapters demonstrate the Processing toolbox and include a brief investigation on how to extend QGIS. Throughout this book, we will be using the GeoPackage format, and we will also discuss how QGIS can support many different types of data. Finally, you will learn where to get help and how to become engaged with the GIS community.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Creating a GeoPackage

In this chapter, we will create some data. It will be captured in the same location and projection as the QGIS sample data. We will focus on mapping the island off the coast of Anchorage called Fire Island. First off, let's create a GeoPackage called Fire_Island.

To create a New GeoPackage Layer (a layer within a GeoPackage), we first need to create a new GeoPackage. From the Layer menu, select Create Layer | New GeoPackage Layer, as shown in the following screenshot:

Creating a GeoPackage layer

In the resulting dialog box, fill in the parameters, as in the following screenshot:

GeoPackage reference dialog box

We are going to create a layer in this GeoPackage called Fire_Island_Points, with Geometry type as Point and the coordinate reference system as EPSG 2964. Create a New field called Description and set its Type to Text data with a maximum Length...