Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

QGIS is a desktop geographic information system that facilitates data viewing, editing, and analysis. Paired with the most efficient scripting language—Python, we can write effective scripts that extend the core functionality of QGIS. Based on version QGIS 2.18, this book will teach you how to write Python code that works with spatial data to automate geoprocessing tasks in QGIS. It will cover topics such as querying and editing vector data and using raster data. You will also learn to create, edit, and optimize a vector layer for faster queries, reproject a vector layer, reduce the number of vertices in a vector layer without losing critical data, and convert a raster to a vector. Following this, you will work through recipes that will help you compose static maps, create heavily customized maps, and add specialized labels and annotations. As well as this, we’ll also share a few tips and tricks based on different aspects of QGIS.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
QGIS Python Programming Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Adding a vertical legend to the map


A map legend decodes the symbology used in a thematic GIS map for the reader. Legends are tightly integrated into QGIS, and in this recipe, we'll add the default legend from the map to the print composition.

Getting ready

Download the shapefile for this map from https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/Mississippi.zip and extract it to your qgis_data directory in a subdirectory named ms.

As with the previous recipes in this chapter, we will use the MapComposer library from https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/MapComposer.py, to simplify the creation of the map composition.

Place the file in the .qgis2/python directory within your home directory.

How to do it...

This recipe is as simple as creating the map, adding the automatically generated legend, and saving the output to an image. To do this, we need to perform the following steps:

  1. First, we will need to load the Qt and QGIS GUI libraries, followed by the MapComposer library:

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