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

Labeling


We can activate labeling by going to Layer Properties | Labels, selecting Show labels for this layer, and selecting the attribute field that we want to Label with. This is all we need to do to display labels with default settings. While default labels are great for a quick preview, we will usually want to customize labels if we create visualizations for reports or standalone maps.

Using Expressions (the button that is right beside the attribute drop-down list), we can format the label text to suit our needs. For example, the NAME field in our sample airports.shp file contains text in uppercase. To display the airport names in mixed case instead, we can set the title(NAME) expression, which will reformat the name text in title case. We can also use multiple fields to create a label, for example, combining the name and elevation in brackets using the concatenation operator (||), as follows:

title(NAME) || ' (' || "ELEV" || ')'

Note the use of simple quotation marks around text, such...