Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By : Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP
Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By: Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP

Overview of this book

QGIS is an open source solution to GIS. It is widely used by GIS professionals all over the world. It is the leading alternative to the proprietary GIS software. Although QGIS is described as intuitive, it is also by default complex. Knowing which tools to use and how to apply them is essential to producing valuable deliverables on time. Starting with a refresher on the QGIS basics, this book will take you all the way through to creating your first custom QGIS plugin. From the refresher, we will recap how to create, populate, and manage a spatial database. You’ll also walk through styling GIS data, from creating custom symbols and color ramps to using blending modes. In the next section, you will discover how to prepare vector, heat maps, and create live layer effects, labeling, and raster data for processing. You’ll also discover advanced data creation and editing techniques. The last third of the book covers the more technical aspects of QGIS such as using LAStools and GRASS GIS’s integration with the Processing Toolbox, how to automate workflows with batch processing, and how to create graphical models. Finally, you will see how to create and run Python data processing scripts and write your own QGIS plugin with pyqgis. By the end of the book, you will understand how to work with all the aspects of QGIS, and will be ready to use it for any type of GIS work.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering QGIS - Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Styling vectors


In this section, the eight different vector styling types will be covered. The eight types are single symbol, categorized, graduated, rule-based, point-displacement, inverted polygons, heatmap, and 2.5 D.

Note that even though layer rendering is part of vector style properties, it will be discussed separately in the next section as it is common to all vector styling types.

Single-symbol vector styling

The single-symbol vector style applies the same symbol to every record in the vector dataset. This vector style is best when you want a uniform look for a map layer, such as when you style lake polygons or airport points.

The following screenshot shows the Single Symbol style type with default parameters for point vector data. Its properties will be very similar to line and polygon vector data.

Let's take a quick tour of the four parts of the properties window for the Single Symbol style type shown in the previous screenshot:

  • Symbol Preview, in the upper-left corner, shows a preview...