Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook

Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
QGIS Python Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using the map composer


The QGIS Map Composer allows you to combine a map with nonspatial elements that help enhance our understanding of the map. In this recipe, we'll create a basic map composition. A composition requires you to define the physical paper size and output format. Even a simple composition example such as this has over 20 lines of configuration options.

Getting ready

You will need to download the following zipped shapefile and extract it to your qgis_data directory, to a subdirectory named hancock:

https://geospatialpython.googlecode.com/svn/hancock.zip

You will also need to open the Python Console under the Plugins menu in QGIS. You can run this recipe in the console or wrap it in a script for the Script Runner plugin, using the template provided with the plugin.

How to do it...

In this recipe, the major steps are to load the shapefile into a map, build the map composition, and render it to an image, described as follows:

  1. First, we need to import the Qt libraries for image handling...