North Road are proud to announce the official release of SLYR Community Edition, a new open-source version of our powerful SLYR ESRI to Open Source compatibility suite. The Community Edition is available for download from the official QGIS plugin repository today, for QGIS versions 3.4 and above. It supports automated conversion of ESRI .style symbol databases, including conversion of markers, fills, line styles and color ramps to their closest QGIS symbology equivalent, allowing users to instantly transition their style libraries into QGIS!

If you’ve followed our work in the past, it will come as no surprise to hear that North Road are passionate about open source geospatial, and for reducing the barriers which users encounter when moving to open-source software. We see our SLYR tool as an integral part of this process, and the licensed version of the plugin currently supports automated conversion of MXD, LYR, PMF, and other ESRI-specific formats to QGIS documents.

Our intention all along has been to make this tool freely available for all users of open-source geospatial software, and to release our work under a permissive, open-source license so that other projects can take advantage of our reverse engineering efforts. That’s why we made an “open source pledge” a fundamental part of our SLYR tool development! By the terms of this pledge, exactly six months after we hit staged preset funding levels we will open-source more components of the code and update the community version of the plugin accordingly. (This approach gives motivated organisations instant access to the full functionality of the SLYR tool via a license purchase, or free access to a subset of this functionality via the community edition of the plugin. It allows us to heavily invest in further reverse-engineering efforts and improvements to the plugin, to QGIS, and to the wider open-source geospatial community.)

If you’re keen to explore transitioning your workplace from ESRI to open-source, send us an email to discuss what we can offer! North Road staff have years of experience in implementing open-source geospatial solutions within commercial workplaces, and for setting up dual commercial-and-open-source friendly environments.

Recently, staff at North Road have been hard at work on our SLYR “ESRI to QGIS compatiblity suite“, and we thought it’s time to share some of the latest exciting updates with you.

While SLYR begun life as a simple “LYR to QGIS conversion tool”, it quickly matured into a full ArcGIS compatibility suite for QGIS. Aside from its original task of converting ESRI LYR files, SLYR now extends the QGIS interface and adds seamless support for working with all kinds of ArcGIS projects and data files. It’s rapidly becoming a must-have tool for any organisation which uses a mix of ESRI and open source tools, or for any organisation exploring a transition away from ArcGIS to QGIS.

Accordingly, we thought it’s well past time we posted an update detailing the latest functionality and support we’ve added to SLYR over the past couple of months! Let’s dive in…

• Full support for raster LYR file conversion, including unique value renderers, color map renderers, classified renderers, RGB renderers and stretched color ramp renderers:

  

  

• Support for conversion of fill symbol outlines with complex offsets, decorations and dashed line templates
• Conversion of 3D marker and simple 3D lines to their 2d equivalent, matching ArcMap’s 2D rendering of these symbol types
• Beta support for converting map annotations and drawings, including custom text labels and reference scale support
  
• Label and annotation callout support*
• Support for converting bookmarks stored in MXD documents*
• Support for converting ESRI bookmark “.dat” files via drag and drop to QGIS*
  
• Correct conversion of OpenStreetMap and bing maps basemap layers
• SLYR now presents users with a friendly summary of warnings generated during the LYR or MXD conversion process (e.g. due to settings which can’t be matched in QGIS)
  
• Added support for MXD documents generated in very early ArcMap versions
• We’ve added QGIS Processing algorithms allowing for bulk LYR to QLR and MXD to QGS conversion. Now you can run a batch conversion process of ALL MXD/LYR files held at your organisation in one go!
  
• Greatly improved matching of converted symbols to their original ArcGIS appearance, including more support for undocumented ArcGIS symbol rendering behavior
• Support for conversion of text symbols and label settings stored in .style databases*
  
• Directly drag and drop layers and layer groups from ArcMap to QGIS to add them to the current QGIS project (maintaining their ArcGIS symbology and layer settings!)*
• Directly drag and drop layers from ArcCatalog to QGIS windows to open in QGIS*
• Support for ESRI MapServer layers

(*requires QGIS 3.10 or later)

Over the remainder of 2019, we’ll be hard at work further improving SLYR’s support for MXD document conversion, and adding support for automatic conversion of ArcMap print layouts to QGIS print layouts.

While SLYR is not currently an open-source tool, we believe strongly in the power of open source software, and accordingly we’ve been using a significant portion of the funds generated from SLYR sales to extend the core QGIS application itself. This has directly resulted in many exciting improvements to QGIS, which will become widely available in the upcoming QGIS 3.10 release. Some of the features directly funded by SLYR sales include:

• A “Segment Center” placement mode for marker line symbols
• Reworked bookmark handling in QGIS, with a greatly enhanced workflow and usability, and a stable API for 3rd party plugins and scripts to hook into
• Improved handling of layer symbology for layers with broken paths
• Auto repair of all other broken layers with a matching data source whenever a single layer path is fixed in a project
• Support for managing text formats and label settings in QGIS style libraries, allowing storage and management of label and text format presets
• A new Processing algorithm “Combine Style Databases“, allowing multiple QGIS style databases to be merged to one
• Adding a “Save layer styles into GeoPackage” option for the “Package Layers” algorithm
• New expression functions which return file info, such as file paths and base file names
• Adding new options to autofill the batch Processing dialog, including adding input files using recursive filter based file searches
• Coming in QGIS 3.12: A new option to set the color to use when rendering nodata pixels in raster layers
• Coming in QGIS 3.12: A new “random marker fill” symbol layer type, which fills polygons by placing point markers in random locations

You can read more about our SLYR ESRI to QGIS compatibility tool here, or email [email protected] to discuss licensing arrangements for your organisation! Alternatively, send us an email if you’d like to discuss your organisations approach to open-source GIS and for assistance in making this transition as painless as possible.

One product which North Road had the chance to develop last year, and which we are super-proud of, is our SLYR ESRI style to QGIS conversion tool. If you haven’t heard of it before, this tool allows automatic conversion of ESRI .style database files to their equivalent QGIS symbology equivalent. It works well for the most part, and now we’re keen to take this to the next stage.

The good news is that North Road have been conducting extensive research and development over the past 12 months, and we’re pleased to announce our plans for extending SLYR to support ESRI LYR and MXD documents. The LYR and MXD formats are proprietary ESRI-only formats, with no public specifications allowing their use. This is a huge issue for organisations who want to move from an ESRI environment to the open geospatial world, yet are held back by hundreds (or thousands!) of existing ESRI MXD map documents and layer styles which they currently cannot utilise outside of the ESRI software ecosystem. Furthermore, many providers of spatial data only include ESRI specific layer formatting files with their data supplies. This leaves users with no means of utilising these official, pre-defined styles in non-ESRI tools.

In order for us to continue development of the SLYR tool and unlock use of LYR and MXD formats outside of ESRI tools, we are conducting a funding campaign. Sponsors of the campaign will receive access to the tools as they are developed and gain access to official support channels covering their use. At the conclusion of this drive we’ll be releasing all the tools and specifications under a free, open-source license.

You can read the full details of the campaign here, including pricing to become a project sponsor and gain access to the tools as they develop. As a campaign launch promo, we’re offering the first 10 sponsors a super-special discounted rate (as a reward for jumping on the development early).

The mockup below shows what the end goal is: seamless, fully integrated, automatic conversion of MXD and LYR files directly within the QGIS desktop application!