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

Using measuring tools


Another core functionality of any GIS is provided by measurement tools. In QGIS, we find the tools needed to measure lines, areas, and angles in the Attribute toolbar, as shown in this screenshot:

The measurements are updated continuously while we draw measurement lines, areas, or angles. When we draw a line with multiple segments, the tool shows the length of each segment as well as the total length of all the segments put together. To stop measuring, we can just right-click. If we want to change the measurement units from meters to feet or from degrees to radians, we can do this by going to Settings | Options | Map Tools.