We have been continuing our work with the Flagship sponsor of QGIS – Felt to develop their QGIS Plugin – Add to Felt  that makes it even easier to share your maps and data on the web.

What is the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin?

The ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin is a powerful tool that empowers users to export their QGIS projects and layers directly to a Felt web map. This update introduces two fantastic features:

1. Single Layer Sharing: You can now share a single layer from your QGIS project to a Felt map. This means you have greater control over which specific data layers to share, allowing you to tailor your map precisely to your audience’s needs.
2. Map Selection: With the updated plugin, you can choose which map on Felt to add your layer to – a new map, or an ongoing project. This flexibility simplifies your workflow and ensures that your data ends up in the right place.

Businesses that rely on QGIS love how these new features provide a seamless way to view and share results, ultimately allowing them to move more quickly and stay in sync:

“Felt helps us keep each other updated on what we’ve done, what we’ve modeled, how things are progressing.” – ICON Engineering

Why is this Update Important?

Web maps are invaluable tools for sharing data with a wider audience, be it colleagues, clients, or the public. They provide creators with the ability to control data visibility, display options, and audience access, all within an easily shareable digital format. However, creating web maps can be an arduous and complex task.

Here’s where the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin update comes to the rescue:

1. Streamlining the Process: Creating web maps traditionally involves website development, data hosting, and map application development—tasks that require a diverse skill set. This complexity can be a significant barrier, especially for smaller operations with limited resources or budget constraints.

2. Felt Simplifies Web Mapping: Felt makes it effortless to create web maps, and share them as easily as you would a Google Doc or Sheet. Simply drag and drop your data, customize the symbology to your liking, and share the map with a link or by inviting collaborators. No need to send large data files or answer questions about the map’s data sources.

3. Integration with QGIS: Now, the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin bridges the gap between QGIS and Felt. It seamlessly imports your QGIS data into Felt, eliminating the need for manual data transfers and reducing the complexity of web map creation.

In essence, the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin update simplifies the process of sharing and collaborating on web maps. It empowers users to harness the full potential of web-based mapping, making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise. The update makes it even easier to share progress updates or model re-run outputs without creating a new map, or sharing a new map link.

So, if you’re a QGIS user looking to enhance your map-sharing capabilities and streamline your workflow, make sure to take advantage of this fantastic update. Say goodbye to the complexities of web map creation and hello to effortless, data-rich web maps with Felt and the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin.

How to install and upgrade

• Open QGIS on your computer. You must have version 3.22 or later installed.
• In the plugins tab, select Manage and Install Plugins.
• Search for the ‘Add to Felt’ plugin, select and click Install Plugin.
• Close the Plugins dialog. The Felt plugin toolbar will appear in your toolbar for use.
• Sign into Felt and begin sharing your maps to the web.

If you want more features in this plugin, let us know or you’re interested in exploring how a QGIS plugin can make your service easily accessible to the millions of daily QGIS users, contact us to discuss how we can help!

Growing up, I would spend hours lost in National Geographic maps. The feeling of discovering new regions and new ways to view the world was addictive! It’s this same feeling of discovery and exploration which has made me super excited about Soar’s Digital Atlas. Soar is the brainchild of Australian, Amir Farhand, and is fuelled by the talents of staff located across the globe to build a comprehensive digital atlas of the world’s maps and images. Soar has been designed to be an easy to use, expansive collection of diverse maps from all over the Earth. A great aspect of Soar is that it has implemented Strong Community Guidelines and moderation to ensure the maps are fit for purpose.

Recently, North Road collaborated with Soar to help facilitate their digital atlas goals by creating a QGIS plugin for Soar. The Soar plugin allows QGIS users to directly:

• Export their QGIS maps and images straight to Soar
• Browse and load maps from the entire Soar public catalogue into their QGIS projects

There’s lots of extra tweaks we’ve added to help make the plugin user friendly, whilst offering tons of functionality that power users want. For instance, users can:

• Filter Soar maps by their current project extent and/or by category
• Export raw or rendered raster data directly to Soar via a Processing tool
• Batch upload multiple maps to Soar
• Incorporate Soar map publishing into a Processing model or Python based workflow

Soar will be presenting their new plugin at the QGIS Open Day in August so check out the details here and tune in at 2300 AEST or 1300 HR UTC. You can follow along via either YouTube or Jitsi.

Browsing Soar maps from QGIS

One of the main goals of the Soar QGIS plugin was to make it very easy to find new datasets and add them to your QGIS projects. There’s two ways users can explore the Soar catalog from QGIS:

You can open the Soar Browser Panel via the Soar toolbar button  . This opens a floating catalog browser panel which allows you to interactively search Soar’s content while working on your map.

Alternatively, you can also access the Soar catalog and maps from the standard QGIS Data Source Manager dialog. Just open the “Soar” tab and search away!

When you’ve found an interesting map, hit the “Add to Map” button and the map will be added as a new layer into your current project. After the layer is loaded you can freely modify the layer’s style (such as the opacity, colorization, contrast etc) just like any other raster dataset using the standard QGIS Layer Style controls.

Sharing your maps

Before you can share your maps on Soar, you’ll need to first sign up for a free Soar account.

We’ve designed the Soar plugin with two specific use cases in mind for sharing maps. The first use case is when you want to share an entire map (i.e. QGIS project) to Soar. This will publish all the visible content from your map onto Soar, including all the custom styling, labeling, decorations and other content you’ve carefully designed. To do this, just select the Project menu, Import/Export -> Export map to Soar option.

You’ll have a chance to enter all the metadata and descriptive text explaining your map, and then the map will be rendered and uploaded directly to Soar.

All content on the Soar atlas is moderated, so your shared maps get added to the moderation queue ready for review by the Soar team. (You’ll be notified as soon as the review is complete and your map is publicly available).

Alternatively, you might have a specific raster layer which you want to publish on Soar. For instance, you’ve completed some flood modelling or vegetation analysis and want to share the outcome widely. To do this, you can use the “Publish dataset to Soar” tool available from the QGIS Processing toolbox:

Just pick the raster layer you want to upload, enter the metadata information, and let the plugin do the rest! Since this tool is made available through QGIS’ Processing framework, it also allows you to run it as a batch process (eg uploading a whole folder of raster data to Soar), or as a step in your QGIS Graphical Models!

Some helpful hints

All maps uploaded to Soar require the following information:

• Map Title
• Description
• Tags
• Categories
• Permission to publish

This helps other users to find your maps with ease, and also gives the Soar moderation team the information required for their review process.

We’ve a few other tips to keep in mind to successfully share your maps on Soar:

• The Soar catalog currently works with raster image formats including GeoTIFF / ECW / JP2 / JPEG / PNG
• All data uploaded to Soar must be in the WGS84 Pseudo-Mercator (EPSG: 3857) projection
• Check the size of your data before sharing it, as a large size dataset may take a long time to upload

So there you have it! So simple to start building up your contribution to Soar’s Digital Atlas. Those who might find this useful to upload maps include:

• Community groups
• Hobbyists
• Building a cartographic/geospatial portfolio
• Education/research
• Contributing to world events (some of the biggest news agencies already use this service i.e. BBC)

You can find out more about the QGIS Soar plugin at the QGIS Open Day on August 23rd, 2023 at 2300 HR AEST or 1300 HR UTC. Check here for more information or to watch back after.

If you’re interested in exploring how a QGIS plugin can make your service easily accessible to the millions of daily QGIS users, contact us to discuss how we can help!

Thanks to the recent popularity of the “30 Day Map Challenge“, the month of November has become synonymous with beautiful maps and cartography. During this November we’ll be sharing a bunch of tips and tricks which utilise some advanced QGIS functionality to help create beautiful maps.

One technique which can dramatically improve the appearance of maps is to swap out rectangular inset maps for more organic shapes, such as circles or ovals.

Back in 2020, we had the opportunity to add support for directly creating circular insets in QGIS Print Layouts (thanks to sponsorship from the City of Canning, Australia!). While this functionality makes it easy to create non-rectangular inset maps the steps, many QGIS users may not be aware that this is possible, so we wanted to highlight this functionality for our first 30 Day Map Challenge post.

Let’s kick things off with an example map. We’ve shown below an extract from the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Bid that some of the North Road team helped create (on behalf of SMEC for EKS). This map is designed to highlight potential venues around South East Queensland and the travel options between these regions:

Circles featured heavily in previous Olympic bid maps (such as Budapest) where we took our inspiration from. This may, or may not, play a part in using the language of the target map audience – think Olympic rings!

Budapest Olympics 2024 Masterplan

Step by Step Guide to Creating a Circle Inset

Firstly, prepare a print layout with both a main map and an inset map. Make sure that your inset map is large enough to cover your circular shape:

From the Print Layout toolbar, click on the Add Shape button and then select Add Ellipse:

Draw the ellipse over the middle of your inset map (hint: holding down Shift while drawing the ellipse will force it to a circular shape!). If you didn’t manage to create an exact circle then you can manually specify the width and height in the shape item’s properties. For this one, we went with a 50mm x 50mm circle:

Next, select the Inset Map item and in its Item Properties click on the Clipping Settings button:

In the Clipping Settings, scroll down to the second section and tick the Clip to Item box and select your Ellipse item from the list. (If you have labels shown in your inset map you may also want to check the “force labels inside clipping shape” option to force these labels inside the circle. If you don’t check this option then labels will be allowed to overflow outside of the circle shape.)

Your inset map will now be bound to the ellipse!

Here’s a bit more magic you could add to this map – in the Main Map’s properties, click on Overviews and set create one for the Inset map – it will nicely show the visible circular area and not the rectangle!

Bonus Points: Circular Title Text!

For advanced users, we’ve another fun tip…and when we say fun, we mean ‘let’s play with radians’! Here we’re going to create some title text and a wedged background which curves around the outside of our circular inset. This takes some fiddly playing around, but the end result can be visually striking! Here we’re going to push the QGIS print layout “HTML” item to create some advanced graphics, so some HTML and CSS coding experience is advantageous. (An alternative approach would be to use a vector illustration application like Inkscape, and add your title and circular background as an SVG item in the print layout).

We’ll start by creating some curved circular text:

First, add a “HTML frame” to your print layout:

HTML frames allow placement of dynamic content in your layouts, which can use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create graphical components.

In the HTML item’s “source” box, add the following code:

<svg height="300" width="350">
        <defs>
            <clipPath id="circleView">
                <circle id="curve" cx="183" cy="156" r="25" fill="transparent" />
            </clipPath>
        </defs>
        <path id="forText" d="M 28,150, C 25,50, 180,-32,290,130" stroke="" fill="none"/>
            <text x="0" y="35" width="100">
                <textpath xlink:href="#forText">
                    <tspan font-weight="bold" fill="black">Place text here</tspan>
                </textpath>
            </text>
             <style>
    <![CDATA[
      text{
        dominant-baseline: hanging;
        font: 20px Arial;
      }
    ]]>
  </style>
</svg>

Now, let’s add in a background to bring more focus onto the title!

To add in the background, create another HTML item. We’ll again create the arc shape using an SVG element, so add the following code into the item’s source box:

<svg width="750" height="750" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <path d="M 90 70
           A 56 56, 0, 0, 0, 133 140
           L 150 90 Z" fill="#414042" transform=" scale(2.1) rotate(68 150 150) " />/>
</svg>

(You can read more about SVG  curves and arcs paths over at MDN)

So there we go! These two techniques can help push your QGIS map creations further and make it easier to create beautiful cartography directly in QGIS itself. If you found these tips useful, keep an eye on this blog as we post more tips and tricks over the month of November. And don’t forget to follow the 30 day Map Challenge for a smorgasbord of absolutely stunning maps.

For the QGIS 3.28 release North Road had the exciting opportunity to add some much desired new functionality to QGIS: the ability to mix font formatting and styles within a single map label! This enhancement was funded by the Swiss QGIS User Group, and offers a whole range of new cartographic possibilities for all QGIS users. Read on for more details on how this can impact your mapping…

QGIS has long supported the ability to combine different values inside a label for a feature, via the use of custom QGIS expressions. For example, the map below labels features from a rail station layer with the expression

"NAME" || '\n' || "PATRONAGE"

This expression concatenates the field values inside the “NAME” field with their “PATRONAGE” values, using a new line character to separate the two values. The end result looks something like this:

While custom expressions are extremely flexible and offer an almost unlimited range of possibilities to tweak label content, the limitation has been that all of this label text will always be displayed using a single font, font size, and font style. For example, there was no capacity to show the station names in a larger, bold font, and the patronage values in a smaller size.

That’s all changing thanks to the funding from the QGIS Swiss User Group! Now, in QGIS 3.28, users can combine label text with HTML formatting tags in order to customise exactly how each individual word or character in the label is drawn. Let’s revisit the map shown above and flex these new cartographic muscles…

The first thing we need to do is enable the HTML formatting tags for our labels by checking the “Allow HTML formatting” option in the text properties:

With this option enabled, we can now use a range of HTML and CSS tags to format individual parts of our label. For instance, “<b>bold text</b>” will show the text between the <b> and </b> tags in a bold font. By revising our previous labelling expression we can now get the station names to render in a bold font. Here’s the revised expression:

'<b>' || "NAME" || '</b><p>' || "PATRONAGE"

There’s one other important change we’ve made in the above expression. When using HTML formatting for labels, we need to replace the ‘\n’ newline character with the HTML new paragraph tag “<p>”. Otherwise, our expression is very similar to the previous one, with the exception that we’re wrapping the “NAME” field in <b>…</b> tags.

Here’s how it looks:

That’s already a dramatic improvement in the readability of the map! Let’s try refining it further by dropping down the font size of the patronage values. We can do that by inserting some CSS into the label string, specifically the “font-size” property. Here’s our new expression:

'<b>' || "NAME" || '</b><p><span style="font-size: 10pt">' || "PATRONAGE" || '</span>'

It’s so beautiful now! (Go on, scroll back up to our original map, we dare you to compare!).

So which HTML/CSS formatting options are supported? For QGIS 3.28, these options are:

• Font family, via the CSS font-family tag. E.g. <span style=”font-family: Comic Sans MS”>…</span>
• Font size, via the CSS font-size tag. E.g. <span style=”font-size: 30pt”>…</span>
• Font weights, via the HTML <b> tag or CSS font-weight tag
• Italic, via the HTML <i> tag or CSS “font-style: italic”
• Font color, via the CSS “color: #rrggbb” tag
• Underline, via the HTML <u> tag or CSS “text-decoration: underline” tag
• Strikethrough, via the HTML <s> tag or CSS “text-decoration: line-through” tag
• Overline, via the CSS “text-decoration: overline” tag

Oh, one last thing we nearly forgot to mention: all these wonderful styling options also apply perfectly to curved label text!

Our thanks go out to the members of the Swiss QGIS User Group for funding this feature! It’s an exciting addition to QGIS and can offer new ways to dramatically improve your mapping creations.

Got any QGIS needs you’d like to discuss? Or want to see additional formatting options added in a future QGIS release? Just contact our friendly team to discuss your needs — we’d love to assist!

The QGIS 3.22 release is just around the corner, and we’d love to introduce you to one of the exciting changes included in this version. Just like all QGIS major releases, 3.22 brings a whole swag of improvements designed to enhance and simplify your mapping needs. In this post we’ll be highlighting one of these improvements — “Annotation Layers”. Before we dive further in, we need to extend our heartfelt thanks to the Swiss QGIS User Group who provided the funding required for this work. The Swiss User Group has invested heavily in cartographic enhancements to QGIS over many years, and it’s great to see this tradition continue for the 3.22 release!

So… let’s dive into Annotation Layers in QGIS 3.22, and what this new functionality allows you to do! Before we can get started, we’ll need to enable the new “Annotations” toolbar (it’s hidden by default). You can do this through the “View” – “Toolbars” menu by checking the “Annotations Toolbar” option. This will show a new toolbar, full of useful actions for creating and working with annotation layers:

Annotation layers can contain a whole mix of different annotation types. In QGIS 3.22 this includes markers, lines, polygons and text. (We anticipate this list will grow steadily in future QGIS releases!)

Creating an annotation is as easy is picking the desired item type (marker, line, polygon or text), and then drawing directly onto your map:

All the usual QGIS shortcuts for creating features apply when creating annotation items. A line or polygon annotation is drawn by left-clicking once for each vertex, with a final right mouse click to complete the shape. Snapping can be enabled while you draw, you can use the “Advanced Digitizing Tools” to precisely place vertices, and even switch the drawing tools to the streaming mode for completely free-form shapes!

While annotations are created in this free-form way, every annotation item is still completely geo-referenced and tied to a particular geographic location. Moving your map, changing the scale or changing projection won’t cause your annotations to jump around the map. Rather, they’ll be locked in place to the location you’ve drawn them:

Unlike features in a traditional vector layer, it’s easy to interactively style annotation items on an item-by-item basis. (This is what makes them a great tool to help quickly create beautiful maps!). All the item appearance properties are set through the QGIS “Layer Styling” dock, which allows you to interactively tweak an item’s appearance without any annoying dialog windows getting in your way. Annotation items support all of QGIS’ rich symbology and labelling options, including layer effects (drop shadows, inner/outer glows), blending modes (multiply, overlay, etc), opacity, and even data-driven symbol property overrides!

Unlike traditional vector or raster (or mesh, or point cloud!) layers, an annotation layer isn’t linked to any external dataset. They exist within a single QGIS project only, so they are perfect for project-specific markups and cartographic notes. By default, any newly created annotation item will be placed on top of all your other map content. (Formally, they are added into a “main annotation layer” which is always drawn on the very top of the map.) This main annotation layer is a special beast, and you won’t see it listed alongside all the other layers in your project. If you need to interact with it, say to change a layer-level setting like the opacity or blend mode, just select the “Main Annotation Layer Properties” option from the annotations toolbar:

In addition to this special main annotation layer, it’s also possible to create your own secondary annotation layers. From the annotations toolbar, select the “New Annotation Layer” option and a brand new annotation layer will be added to your project. Unlike the main annotation layer, you’ll see any secondary annotation layers appear in the list of your project’s layers. Just like any other map layer, you can toggle their visibility, rename them, and even reposition them to control whether the annotations show above or below particular layers in your map!

(Note that whenever you have a secondary annotation layer selected as the current layer, any newly drawn annotation items will be placed into this layer instead of the main annotation layer.)

So there we go — that’s a quick dive into annotation layers in QGIS 3.22, and some of the new cartographic capabilities they unlock for your maps! We see this as the starting point of an exciting journey, and North Road developers have many plans for further enhancement of annotation layers in future QGIS releases. (And naturally, we’ve also added full support for ArcGIS drawings to QGIS annotation layer conversion to our SLYR ESRI conversion toolkit!) If you’ve something specific you’d love to see added to annotations layers, just contact us at [email protected] to discuss sponsorship options.

If you’re a follower of North Road’s social media accounts, it probably comes as no surprise to hear that we love sharing regular tips and useful suggestions about working with spatial data on these channels. Recently, we realised we were close to a new milestone of 4k followers of our Twitter stream. This milestone gave us the perfect excuse to give something back to all these followers! So we ran a little promo, where we promised that if we hit 4k followers we’d implement a new feature in QGIS, as determined by a popular vote:

*GIVE AWAY*
We’re nearly at 4K followers! ?
We love you guys, so as a thank-you to our wonderful community for sharing and liking our tweets we want to give YOU something! Vote for your favourite #QGIS feature below and we’ll add the most popular when we hit 4,000 followers!

— North Road (@northroadgeo) August 8, 2020

Given we’ve now reached the target milestone, it was our turn to deliver! So we’re proud to introduce a new feature coming in QGIS 3.16: the ability to control exactly where labels are positioned along line feature! Let’s take a look!…

In previous QGIS releases, whenever labels are enabled for a line layer these labels will automatically gravitate towards the center of the line features:

In certain situations, it’s desirable for these labels to be positioned in specific positions along these line features (e.g. at the start of lines, or at the end of lines). With this new feature gift to the community, QGIS users have to option to precisely control the label placement for these lines:

There’s new options for placing the labels at the start of lines, end of lines, or at a custom offset along the line.

This option can be super-handy when combined with Rule Based Labelling, as it allows you to have different labels at the start versus end of lines:

So there we go! Another great QGIS cartography enhancement, heading your way in QGIS 3.16, and just a little thank you back to the community for all your support of North Road.

And if you’re not following us on social media yet, it’s a great to start… because who knows when our next little giveaway will be?!

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Thanks to the success of our recent QGIS Print Layouts Graphs and Charts crowdfunding campaign, staff at North Road and Faunalia have been busy updating and improving the QGIS “DataPlotly” plugin with the goal of allowing beautiful charts inside your print layouts.

We’re super-excited to announce that the beta release of this new functionality is now available! With this beta installed, you’ll see a new icon in your QGIS Print Layout designer window:

Clicking this button will allow you to draw a new plot onto your print layout, just like you would any other standard layout item (like legends, scalebars, etc). Any print layout chart can be customised by right-clicking the chart and selecting “Item Properties“. This will open a panel with settings like position, size, frame, and other standard options. All the magic happens when you click the “Setup Plot” button inside this panel:

This exposes the vast array of styling and charting options available for use. If you’re an existing user of the DataPlotly QGIS plugin, you’ll recognise that these are the same settings you have available when creating interactive plots alongside the main map canvas. Every setting is now available for use in print layouts!

To grab the beta, head over to https://github.com/ghtmtt/DataPlotly/releases/tag/v3.9-beta and download the DataPlotly.zip file. Then, inside QGIS, select the Manage and Install Plugins option from the Plugins menu. Click on the “Install from ZIP” section, and point the dialog at your downloaded DataPlotly.zip file. Click “Install Plugin“, and then restart QGIS for good measure. When QGIS restarts you should see the new chart icon inside the print layout designer.

Note that you’ll need a recent QGIS release for this to work correctly — either QGIS 3.8.3 or 3.4.12. (The print layout functionality may not be compatible with earlier releases, as we’ve had to fix several issues inside QGIS itself to get this feature working as designed!). 

We are actively seeking feedback and user testing on this beta release. If you encounter any issues, just head over to https://github.com/ghtmtt/DataPlotly/issues and let us know.

We’ll be further refining this functionality, with the goal of releasing the final non-beta version of the plugin to coincide with the upcoming QGIS 3.10 release.

Happy charting!

Recently, we’ve been working on an exciting development which is coming soon in QGIS 3.10… support for Geospatial PDF exports! This has been a long-desired feature for many QGIS users, and it was only made possible thanks to a group of financial backers (listed below). In this post, we’re going to explore these new features and how they improve your QGIS PDF outputs.

Geospatial PDFs can now be created either by exporting the main QGIS map canvas, or by creating and exporting a custom print layout. For instance, when you select the “Save Map as PDF” option from the main QGIS window, you’ll see a new group of Geospatial PDF related options:

At its most basic, Geospatial PDF is a standard extension to the PDF format which allows for vector spatial datasets to be embedded in PDF files. If the “Include vector feature information” checkbox is ticked when creating a Geospatial PDF output, then QGIS will automatically include all the geometry and attribute information from features visible within the page. So if we export a simple map to PDF, we’ll get an output file which looks just like any old regular PDF map output…

…but, we can also pull this PDF back into QGIS and treat it just like any other vector data source! In the screenshot below we’re using the Identify tool to query on of the polygons and see all the attribute information from the original source layer.

This ability adds a lot of value to PDF exports. Anyone who has ever been supplied a non-spatial PDF as a “spatial dataset” will attest to the frustrations these cause… but if you create proper Geospatial PDFs instead, then there’s no loss of the valuable underlying spatial information or feature attributes! Furthermore, if these PDFs are opened within Acrobat Reader, tools are enabled which allow users to query features interactively.

Another nice benefit which comes with Geospatial PDF output is that layers can be interactively toggled on or off in the PDF viewer. The screenshot below shows a Geospatial PDF file created from a simple QGIS map. On the left we have a list of the layers in the PDF, each of which can be turned on or off inside the PDF viewer!

The really nice thing here is that, thanks to the underlying smarts in the GDAL library which is responsible for the actual Geospatial PDF creation, the PDF renders identically to our original QGIS map. While labels turn on and off alongside their corresponding map layer, they are still correctly stacked in the exact same way as you see in the QGIS window. Furthermore, the created PDFs keep labels and vector features as vector artwork… so there’s absolutely no loss in quality when zooming in to the map! These files look GREAT!

On that same note… the sponsorship allowed us to tackle another related issue, which is that in previous QGIS versions PDF (or SVG) exports would always export every single vertex from any visible feature! Ouch! This meant that if you had a complex polygon boundary layer, you would potentially be creating a PDF with millions of vertices per feature, even though most of these would be overlapping and completely redundant at the exported map’s scale. Now, QGIS automatically simplifies vector features while exporting them (using an appropriate, effectively invisible, level of simplification). The dramatically reduces the created file sizes and speeds up opening them and navigating them in other applications (especially Inkscape). (There’s an option at export time to disable this simplification, if you have a specific reason to!).

Creating Geospatial PDFs from print layouts gives even more options. For a start, whenever a print layout is exported to Geospatial PDFs, we ensure that the created PDF correctly handles stacking of layers alongside any other print layout items you have. In the image below we see a custom print layout which includes interactive layer visibility controls. If a layer is toggled, it’s hidden only from the map item — all the other surrounding elements like the title, north arrow and scalebar remain visible:

That’s not all though! When exporting a print layout to Geospatial PDF, QGIS also hooks into any map themes you’ve setup in your project. If you select to include these themes in your output, then the result is magical! The screenshot below shows the export options for a project with a number of themes, and we’ve chosen to export these themes in the PDF:

Opening the resultant PDF shows that our layer control on the left now lists the map themes instead of individual layers. Viewers can switch between these themes, changing the visibility of layers and their styling to match the QGIS map theme from the project! Additionally, you can even expand out a theme and expose layer-by-layer visibility control. Wow! This means you could create a single PDF output file which includes an environmental, social, cadastral, transport, …. view of your map, all in the one file.

Lastly, there’s even control for fine-tuning the combination of layers which are exposed in the output PDF file and which ones should be toggled on and off together. In the screenshot below we’ve opted to group the “Aircraft” and “Roads” map layers into a single logical PDF group called “Transport”. 

The resultant PDF respects this, showing an entry in the interactive layer tree for “Transport” which toggles both the aircraft and roads layers together:

So there you go — the power of Geospatial PDF, coming your way in QGIS 3.10!

One semi-related benefit of this work is that it gave us an opportunity to rework how “layered” exports from print layouts are created. This has had a significant flow-on impact on the existing ability to create layered SVG outputs from QGIS. Previously, this was a rather fragile feature, which created SVGs with lots of issues – overlapping labels, incorrectly stacked layers, and last-but-not-least, non-descriptive layer names! Now, just like Geospatial PDF exports, the layered SVG exports correctly respect the exact look of your map, and have much more friendly, descriptive layer names:

This should significantly reduce the amount of housekeeping required when working on these layered SVG exports. 

This work was funded by:

• Land Vorarlberg
• Municipality of Vienna
• Municipality of Dornbirn
• Biodiversity Information Service for Powys and BBNP Local
• Kanton Zug
• Canton de Neuchâtel
• Canton de Thurgovia

North Road are leading experts in extending the QGIS application to meet your needs. If you’d like to discuss how you can sponsor development of features or fixes which you want in QGIS, just contact us for further details!

Thanks to an anonymous corporate sponsor, we’ve recently had the opportunity to add a new Hashed Line symbol type for QGIS 3.8. This allows for a repeating line segment to be drawn over the length of a feature, with a line-sub symbol used to render each individual segment.

There’s tons of options available for customising the appearance and placement of line hashes. We based the feature heavily off QGIS’ existing “Marker Line” support, so you can create hashed lines placed at set intervals, on line vertices, or at the start/end/middle of lines. There’s options to offset the lines, and tweak the rotation angle of individual hashes too. Added to QGIS’ rich support for “data defined” symbol properties, this allows for a huge range of new symbol effects.

E.g. using a data defined hash length which increases over the length of a feature gives us this effect:

Or, when using a complex line sub-symbol for rendering each hash, we can get something like this:

Or even go completely “meta” and use a hashed line sub symbol for the hash line itself!

With the right combination of symbol settings and QGIS draw effects you can even emulate a calligraphic pen effect:

Or a chunky green highlighter!

This same corporate sponsor also funded a change which results in a huge improvement to the appearance of both rotated hashed lines and marker lines. Previously, when marker or hash lines were rendered, the symbol angles were determined by taking the exact line orientation at the position of the symbol. This often leads to undesirable rendering effects, where little “bumps” or corners in lines which occur at the position of the symbol cause the marker or hash line to be oriented at a very different angle to what the eye expects to see.

With this improvement, the angle is instead calculated by averaging the line over a specified distance either side of the symbol. E.g. averaging the line angle over 4mm means we take the points along the line 2mm from either side of the symbol placement, and use these instead to calculate the line angle for that symbol. This has the effect of smoothing (or removing) any tiny local deviations from the overall line direction, resulting in much nicer visual orientation of marker or hash lines.

It’s easiest to show the difference visually. Here’s a before image, showing arrow markers following a line feature. Pay specific attention to the 3rd and last arrow, which seem completely random oriented due to the little shifts in line direction:

With new smoothing logic this is much improved:

The difference is even more noticeable for hashed lines. Here’s the before:

…and the after:

Suffice to say, cartographers will definitely appreciate the result!

Lastly, we’ve taken this new hash line feature as an opportunity to implement automatic conversion of ESRI hash line symbols within our SLYR ESRI to QGIS conversion tool. Read more about SLYR here, and how you can purchase this tool for .style, .lyr and .mxd document conversion.

Following our recent successful QGIS Layout and Reporting Engine crowdfunding campaign, we’ve been hard at working ripping up the internals of the QGIS 2.x print composer and rebuilding a brand new, shiny QGIS layouts engine. This is exciting work – it’s very satisfying to be able to cleanup a lot of the old composer code in QGIS and take opportunities along the way to fix long standing bugs and add new features.

While it’s not ready for daily use yet, there’s already been a lot of interesting changes which have landed in the layouts work as a result of this campaign. Let’s take a look at what’s been implemented so far…

• We’ve added support for different measurements units all throughout layouts. While this means it’s now possible to set page sizes using centimeters, inches, pixels, points, etc, it goes much deeper than just that. In layouts, everything which has a size or position can take advantage of this unit support. So you can have page sizes in centimeters, but a map item with a size set in points, and positioned in millimeters! Having pixels as a unit type makes creation of screen-based layouts much easier – even right down to pixel perfect positioning and sizing of items…
• Page handling has been totally reworked. Instead of the single “number of pages” control available in QGIS 2.x, layouts have complete flexibility in page setup. It’s now possible to have a layout with mixed page sizes and orientations (including data defined page size for different pages in the layout!). 
• A revised status bar, with improved layout interaction widgets. We’ve also taken the opportunity to add some new features like a zoom level slider and option to zoom to layout width:
• Layout interaction tools (such as pan/zoom/insert item/etc) have been reworked. There’s now a much more flexible framework for creation of layout tools (based off the main QGIS map canvas approach), which even allows for plugins to implement their own layout interaction tools! As part of this we’ve addressed a long standing annoyance which meant that creating new items always drew the “preview” shape of the new item as a rectangle – even for non-rectangular items. Now you get a real shape showing exactly how the created item will be sized and positioned:
  
• On the topic of plugins – the layout branch has full support for plugin-provided item types. This means that QGIS plugins can create new classes of items which can be added to a layout. This opens the door for plugins allowing charts and visualisations which take advantage of all the mature Python and JS charting libraries! This is a really exciting change – in 2.x there was no way for plugins to extend or interact with composer, so we’re really keen to see where the community takes this when 3.0 is released.
• We’ve ported another feature commonly found in illustration/DTP applications. Now, when you’re creating a new item and just click in your layout (instead of click-and-drag), you get a handy dialog allowing you to specify the exact position and dimensions for the created item. You can again see in this dialog how layouts have full support for units for both the position and size:
• Another oft-requested feature which we’ve finally been able to add (thanks to the refactored and cleaned code) is a context menu for layouts! It’s currently quite empty, but will be expanded as this work progresses…
• Snapping to guides and grids has been reworked. We’ve added a new snapping marker to show exactly were items will be snapped to:
• Snapping to guides now occurs when creating new layout items (this didn’t happen in Composer in 2.x – only snapping to grids occurred when drawing new items).
• The snapped cursor position is shown in status bar whenever a snapped point will be used, instead of the unsnapped position.
• Unlike in Composers in QGIS 2.x, Layouts in 3.0 adopt the standard UX of dragging out rulers to create guide lines (instead of clicking on a ruler position to create a new guide). Creation of a horizontal guide is now done by grabbing the top ruler and dragging it down, and a vertical guide is created by grabbing the left ruler and dragging it out to the layout.
• Better feedback is given in the ruler when a guide can be dragged. We now show guide positions in the rulers, and give an indication (via mouse cursor change) when these guides can be repositioned by click-and-drag.
• Another very exciting change is the addition of a new “Guide Manager”. The guide manager allows numeric modification of existing guides and creation of new guides. Finally it’s possible to position guides at exact locations! Again, you can see the full support for layout units in place here – guides can be positioned using any available unit.
  
• There’s also a handy new shortcut in the Guide Manager to allow applying the guides from the current page to all other pages in your layout.
• We’ve refined the snapping logic. In Composer in QGIS 2.x,  grids would always take precedence whenever both a grid and guide were within tolerance of a point. Now, guides will always take precedence – since they have been manually set by users we make the assumption that they have been explicitly placed at highly desirable snapping locations, and should be selected over the general background grid. Additionally, grid snapping was previously only done if BOTH the x and y of the point could be snapped to the grid. We now snap to the nearest grid line for x/y separately. This means if a point is close to a vertical grid line but not a horizontal one it will still snap to that nearby vertical grid line.
• Lastly, we’ve added a handy context menu to the rulers:

This is just a taster of the great new functionality coming in QGIS 3.0. This is all a direct result of the forward-thinking investments and generosity of the backers in our QGIS Layout and Reporting Engine crowdfunding campaign. Without their contributions, none of this would be possible – so our thanks go out to those organisations and individuals once again!

Stay tuned for more updates as the work continues…

Thanks to the tireless efforts and incredible generosity of the QGIS user community, our crowdfunded QGIS Layout and Reporting Engine campaign was a tremendous success! We’ve reached the funding goal for this project, and as a result QGIS 3.0 will include a more powerful print composer with a reworked code base. You can read more about what we have planned at the campaign page.

We’d like to take this opportunity to extend our heartfelt thanks to all the backers who have pledged to support this project:

• The Swiss QGIS User group (funded preliminary work in refactoring how compositions are handled and stored within projects)
• The QGIS Grant Program (2016) (funded preliminary work allowing for a flexible property framework which will be used within the project)
• Land Vorarlberg, Austria
• Tudor Bărăscu
• Oester Messtechnik GmbH, Thun, Switzerland
• Ferdinando Urbano, Italy
• Alta ehf, Reykjavik, Iceland
• Trage Wegen, Belgium
• QGIS Denmark User Group, Denmark
• Debuco Techniek B.V., Netherlands
• The QWAT Project
• QGIS Sweden User Group, Sweden
• Andreas Neumann
• Kristianstads kommun, Sweden
• City of Vevey, Switzerland
• Kanton Thurgau, Switzerland
• Ricardo Pinho, Portugal
• Portugese QGIS User Group, Portugal
• Waymotion, Portugal
• Lloyd Analytics LLC, USA
• Canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
• Hartmut Dickel, Switzerland

We’ve also received numerous anonymous contributions in addition to these – please know that the QGIS community extends their gratitude for your contributions too! This campaign was also successful thanks to The Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, Denmark, who stepped up and have funded an initial component of this project directly.

We’d also like to thank every member of the QGIS community who assisted with promoting this campaign and bringing it to the attention of these backers. Without your efforts we would not have been able to reach these backers and the campaign would not have been successful.

We’ll be posting more updates as this work progresses. Stay tuned…

At North Road we are currently running a crowdfunding campaign to sponsor work on a new “Point Cluster Renderer” for QGIS. This is a really exciting new feature which would help make possible some neat styling effects which just aren’t possible in QGIS at the moment. The campaign is now in its final hours and we’ve still got some way to go to reach the campaign goals. If you’re interested in seeing this feature happen, now’s the time to jump onboard and contribute to the campaign!

Before time runs out we’d like to share some more details on how the cluster renderer can be enhanced through the use of data defined symbol overrides. Data defined overrides are where a huge part of QGIS’ symbology power resides. If you’re not familiar with them, we’d suggest grabbing a copy of Anita Graser and Gretchen Peterson’s reference “QGIS Map Design” (seriously – buy this book. You won’t regret it!). Basically, data defined properties allow you to set rules in place which control exactly how each individual feature in a layer is rendered. So, for instance, you can create an override which makes just a single feature render in a different color, or with a larger label, or so that all features with a value over 100 render with a bold label.

We’ve designed the point cluster renderer to take full advantage of QGIS data defined symbology. What this means is that the cluster symbol (ie, the marker which is rendered when 2 or more points are sufficiently close together) will respect any data defined overrides you set for this symbol, and each individual cluster symbol can have a different appearance as a result.

To make this even more flexible, the clusterer will also provide two additional new variables which can be used in data defined overrides for the symbol. The first of these, @cluster_size, will be preset to equal the number of features which have been clustered together at that point. Eg, if the cluster consists of 4 individual neighbouring features, then @cluster_size will be 4 when the cluster symbol is rendered. This can be used to alter the appearance of the cluster symbol based on the number of associated points. The mockup below shows how this could be used to scale the cluster symbol size so that clusters with more points are rendered larger than clusters with less points:

In this mockup we’ve also used a font marker symbol layer to render the actual cluster size inside the symbol too. Of course, because almost every property of symbols in QGIS can be data defined there’s almost no limit how @cluster_size could be used – you could use it to change the symbol color by pairing it with QGIS’ ramp_color function, or alter the symbol opacity, or the outline width… basically anything!

The second new expression variable which would be introduced with the cluster renderer is @cluster_color. This variable allows you to access the color of the points contained within each cluster. Since the cluster renderer is built “on top” of an existing renderer, any point which is NOT contained within a cluster is rendered using the specified renderer. For example, if you use a categorized symbol renderer then all points which aren’t in clusters will be drawn using these categorized classes. In this case isolated points will be drawn using different colors to match the predefined classes.

When multiple points are clustered together, @cluster_color will be set to match the color of any contained points. The points must all have the same color, if they differ then @cluster_color will be null. It’s easiest to illustrate this concept! In the below mockup, we’ve used a categorized render to shade points by an attribute (in this case rail line segment name), and used an uninspiring dark grey circle for the cluster markers:

Using @cluster_color together with a data defined color override, we can force these cluster markers to retain the colors from the points within each cluster:

Much nicer! You’ll note that a single dark grey point remains, which is where the cluster consists of stations from multiple different line segments. In this case @cluster_color is null, so the data defined override is not applied and the marker falls back to the dark grey color.

Of course, both @cluster_size and @cluster_color can be combined to create some very nice results:

So there we have it – using data defined overrides with the cluster marker renderer allows for extremely flexible, powerful cartography!

Now’s the time to get involved… if you’re wanting to see this feature in QGIS, head over to the crowd funding page to find out how YOU can contribute!

I’m pleased to announce that the crowdfunded work on layer effects for QGIS is now complete and available in the current development snapshots! Let’s dive in and explore how these effects work, and check out some of the results possible using them.

I’ll start with a simple polygon layer, with some nice plain styling:

If I open the properties for this layer and switch to the Style tab, there’s a new checkbox for “Draw effects“. Let’s enable that, and then click the little customise effects button to its right:

A new “Effects Properties” dialog opens:

You can see that currently the only effect listed is a “Source” effect. Source effects aren’t particularly exciting – all they do is draw the original layer unchanged. I’m going to change this to a “Blur” effect by clicking the “Effect type” combo box and selecting “Blur“:

If I apply the settings now, you’ll see that the polygon layer is now blurry. Now we’re getting somewhere!

Ok, so back to the Effects Properties dialog. Let’s try something a bit more advanced. Instead of just a single effect, it’s possible to chain multiple effects together to create different results. Let’s make a traditional drop shadow by adding a “Drop shadow” effect under the “Source” effect:

Effects are drawn top-down, so the drop shadow will appear below the source polygons:

Of course, if you really wanted, you could rearrange the effects so that the drop shadow effect is drawn above the source!..

You can stack as many effects as you like. Here’s a purple inner glow over a source effect, with a drop shadow below everything:

Now it’s time to get a bit more creative… Let’s explore the “transform” effect. This effect allows you to apply all kinds of transformations to your layer, including scaling, shearing, rotation and translation:

Here’s what the layer looks like if I add a horizontally shearing transform effect above an outer glow effect:

Transforms can get really freaky. Here’s what happens if we apply a 180° rotation to a continents layer (with a subtle nod to xkcd):

Remember that all these effects are applied when the layers are rendered, so no modifications are made to the underlying data.

Now, there’s one last concept regarding effects which really blasts open what’s possible with them, and that’s “Draw modes“. You’ll notice that this combo box contains a number of choices, including “Render“, “Modify” and “Render and Modify“:

These draw modes control how effects are chained together. It’s easiest to demonstrate how draw modes work with an example, so this time I’ll start with a Transform effect over a Colorise effect. The transform effect is set to a 45° rotation, and the colorise effect set to convert to grayscale. To begin, I’ll set the transform effect to a draw mode of Render only:

In this mode, the results of the effect will be drawn but won’t be used to modify the underlying effects:

So what we have here is that the polygon is drawn rotated by 45° by the transform effect, and then underneath that there’s a grayscale copy of the original polygon drawn by the colorise effect. The results of the transform effect have been rendered, but they haven’t affected the underlying colorise effect.

If I instead set the Transform effect’s draw mode to “Modifier only” the results are quite different:

Now, the transform effect is rotating the polygon by 45° but the result is not rendered. Instead, it is passed on to the subsequent colorise effect, so that now the colorise effect draws a grayscale copy of the rotated polygon. Make sense? We could potentially chain a whole stack of modifier effects together to get some great results. Here’s a transform, blur, colorise, and drop shadow effect all chained together using modifier only draw modes:

The final draw mode, “Render and modify” both renders the effect and applies its result to underlying effects. It’s a combination of the two other modes. Using draw modes to customise the way effects chain is really powerful. Here’s a combination of effects which turn an otherwise flat star marker into something quite different:

The last thing I’d like to point out is that effects can be either applied to an entire layer, or to the individual symbol layers for features within a layer. Basically, the possibilities are almost endless! Python plugins can also extend this further by implementing additional effects.

All this work was funded through the 71 generous contributors who donated to the crowdfunding campaign. A big thank you goes out to you all whole made this work possible! I honestly believe that this feature takes QGIS’ cartographic possibilities to whole new levels, and I’m really excited to see the maps which come from it.

Lastly, there’s two other crowdfunding campaigns which are currently in progress. Lutra consulting is crowdfunding for a built in auto trace feature, and Radim’s campaign to extend the functionality of the QGIS GRASS plugin. Please check these out and contribute if you’re interested in their work and would like to see these changes land in QGIS.

If you’re not like me and don’t keep a constant eye over at QGIS development change log (be careful – it’s addictive!), then you’re probably not aware of a bunch of labelling improvements which recently landed in QGIS master version. I’ve been working recently on a large project which involves a lot (>300) of atlas map outputs, and due to the size of this project it’s not feasible to manually tweak placements of labels. So, I’ve been totally at the mercy of QGIS’ labelling engine for automatic label placements. Generally it’s quite good but there were a few things missing which would help this project. Fortunately, due to the open-source nature of QGIS, I’ve been able to dig in and enhance the label engine to handle these requirements (insert rhetoric about beauty of open source here!). Let’s take a look at them one-by-one:

Data defined quadrant in “Around Point” placement mode

First up, it’s now possible to specify a data defined quadrant when a point label is set to the Around Point placement mode. In the past, you had a choice of either Around Point mode, in which QGIS automatically places labels around point features in order to maximise the number of labels shown, or the Offset from Point mode, in which all labels are placed at a specified position relative to the points (eg top-left). In Offset from Point mode you could use data defined properties to force labels for a feature to be placed at a specific relative position by binding the quadrant to a field in your data. This allowed you to manually tweak the placement for individual labels, but at the cost of every other label being forced to the same relative position. Now, you’ve also got the option to data define the relative position when in Around Point mode, so that the rest of the labels will fall back to being automatically placed. Here’s a quick example – I’ll start with a layer with labels in Around Point mode:

You can see that some labels are sitting to the top right of the points, others to the bottom right, and some in the top middle, in order to fit all the labels for these points. With this new option, I can setup a data defined quadrant for the labels, and then force the ‘Tottenham’ label (top left of the map) to display below and to the left of the point:

Here’s what the result looks like:

The majority of the labels are still auto-placed, but Tottenham is now force to the lower left corner.

Data defined label priority

Another often-requested feature which landed recently is the ability to set the priority for individual labels. QGIS has long had the ability to set the priority for an entire labelling layer, but you couldn’t control the priority of features within a layer. That would lead to situations like that shown below, where the most important central station (the green point) hasn’t been labelled:

By setting a data defined priority for labels, I can set the priority either via values manually entered in a field or by taking advantage of an existing “number of passengers” field present in my data. End result is that this central station is now prioritised over any others:

Obstacle only layers

The third new labelling feature is the option for “Obstacle only” layers. What this option does is allow a non-labelled layer to act as an obstacle for the labels in other layers, so they will be discouraged from drawing labels over the features in the obstacle layer. Again, it’s best demonstrated with an example. Here’s my stations layer with labels placed automatically – you can see that some labels are placed right over the features in the rail lines layer:

Now, let’s set the rail lines layer to act as an obstacle for other labels:

The result is that labels will be placed so that they don’t cover the rail lines anymore! (Unless there’s no other choice). Much nicer.

Control over how polygons act as obstacles for labels

This change is something I’m really pleased about. It’s only applicable for certain situations, but when it works the improvements are dramatic.

Let’s start with my labelled stations map, this time with an administrative boundary layer in the background:

Notice anything wrong with this map? If you’re like me, you won’t be able to look past those labels which cross over the admin borders. Yuck. What’s happening here is that although my administrative regions layer is set to discourage labels being placed over features, there’s actually nowhere that labels can possibly be placed which will avoid this. The admin layer covers the entire map, so regardless of where the labels are placed they will always cover an administrative polygon feature. This is where the new option to control how polygon layers act as obstacles comes to the rescue:

Now, I can set the administrative layer to only avoid placing labels over feature’s boundaries! I don’t care that they’ll still be placed inside the features (since we have no choice!), but I don’t want them sitting on top of these boundaries. The result is a big improvement:

Now, QGIS has avoided placing labels over the boundaries between regions. Better auto-placement of labels like this means much less time required manually tweaking their positioning, and that’s always a good thing!

Draw only labels which fit inside a polygon

The last change is fairly self explanatory, so no nice screenshots here. QGIS now has the ability to prevent drawing labels which are too large to fit inside their corresponding polygon features. Again, in certain circumstances this can make a huge cartographic improvement to your map.

So there you go. Lots of new labelling goodies to look forward to when QGIS 2.12 rolls around.