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

Reprojecting and converting vector and raster data


In Chapter 2, Viewing Spatial Data, we talked about CRS and the fact that QGIS offers on the fly reprojection to display spatial datasets, which are stored in different CRS, in the same map. Still, in some cases, we might want to permanently reproject a dataset, for example, to geoprocess it later on.

In QGIS, reprojecting a vector or raster layer is done by simply saving it with a new CRS. We can save a layer by going to Layer | Save as... or using Save as… in the layer name context menu. Pick a target file format and filename, and then click on the Select CRS button beside the CRS drop-down field to pick a new CRS.

Besides changing the CRS, the main use case of the Save vector/raster layer dialog, as depicted in the following screenshot, is conversion between different file formats. For example, we can load a Shapefile and export it as GeoJSON, MapInfo MIF, CSV, and so on, or the other way around.

The Save raster layer dialog is also a convenient...