Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By : Mandel, Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser
Book Image

QGIS 2 Cookbook

By: Mandel, Olaya Ferrero, Anita Graser

Overview of this book

QGIS is a user-friendly, cross-platform desktop geographic information system used to make maps and analyze spatial data. QGIS allows users to understand, question, interpret, and visualize spatial data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps. This book is a collection of simple to advanced techniques that are needed in everyday geospatial work, and shows how to accomplish them with QGIS. You will begin by understanding the different types of data management techniques, as well as how data exploration works. You will then learn how to perform classic vector and raster analysis with QGIS, apart from creating time-based visualizations. Finally, you will learn how to create interactive and visually appealing maps with custom cartography. By the end of this book, you will have all the necessary knowledge to handle spatial data management, exploration, and visualization tasks in QGIS.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Making pretty graticules in any projection

A graticule is a set of reference lines on a map that help orient a map reader. They are often set at, and labeled, with the coordinates. The tricky part about using graticules, however, is projections. If you don't make them correctly, instead of smooth curves between the line intersections, you get awkward unusual shapes (mostly straight lines). The default QGIS graticule creator is not projection-friendly, so in this recipe, you'll see an add-on processing algorithm that does this. This recipe is about ensuring you get nice, smooth, and properly-labeled graticules.

Getting ready

You don't really need much for this recipe other than a bounding box and a coordinate interval that you want to space the lines at. Usually, these will be in Latitude, Longitude WGS 84 (EPSG:4326), and decimal degrees, respectively, since the whole point of a graticule is to add reference lines that help orient a user.

How to do it…

  1. Start by downloading...