Book Image

Learning QGIS - Third Edition

By : Anita Graser
Book Image

Learning QGIS - Third Edition

By: Anita Graser

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user-friendly open source geographic information system (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The popularity of open source geographic information systems and QGIS in particular has been growing rapidly over the last few years. Learning QGIS Third Edition is a practical, hands-on guide updated for QGIS 2.14 that provides you with clear, step-by-step exercises to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. Through clear, practical exercises, this book will introduce you to working with QGIS quickly and painlessly. This book takes you from installing and configuring QGIS to handling spatial data to creating great maps. You will learn how to load and visualize existing spatial data and create data from scratch. You will get to know important plugins, perform common geoprocessing and spatial analysis tasks and automate them with Processing. We will cover how to achieve great cartographic output and print maps. Finally, you will learn how to extend QGIS using Python and even create your own plugin.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Learning QGIS Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Styling vector layers


When we load vector layers, QGIS renders them using a default style and a random color. Of course, we want to customize these styles to better reflect our data. In the following exercises, we will style point, line, and polygon layers, and you will also get accustomed to the most common vector styling options.

Regardless of the layer's geometry type, we always find a drop-down list with the available style options in the top-left corner of the Style dialog. The following style options are available for vector layers:

  • Single Symbol: This is the simplest option. When we use a Single Symbol style, all points are displayed with the same symbol.

  • Categorized: This is the style of choice if a layer contains points of different categories, for example, a layer that contains locations of different animal sightings.

  • Graduated: This style is great if we want to visualize numerical values, for example, temperature measurements.

  • Rule-based: This is the most advanced option. Rule...