Atlas plugin documentation

Overview

The Atlas plugin helps you create map books, or series of maps, in an automatid way.
The concept is to use a coverage layer, wich contains geometries and fields. This layer will define the maps to output. You can create image files or PDF files. All the composition is done in the QGIS map composer, and a specific composition is used as a template.
The plugin allows to replace text labels set up in the composer, with coverage layer's attribute values, enabling you to set a title, comment, document name, page number, or any dynamic information you want to display on your final maps.

Create a project

Begin with a classic QGIS project, import your layers and set styles according to your needs.

Coverage layer

You have to create a layers containing coverage geometries, which can be any type of geometries, even if polygons are best to represent a coverage. The Atlas plugin will read this layer and for each feature of the layer, will create an output map.

This coverage can have any field number and names.

Composer template

You can now create a template for your output, in the Quantum GIS composer. The template is a classic composer document. Two things can be noted :

• You have to remind which map item will contain your coverages. You can know the map item name with the tooltip (Map 0 for example).
• You can use text replacement in label. Every occurence of $FIELD(fieldname) in a label will be replaced by the value of the field with name fieldname in the coverage layer, for the current coverage.

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Atlas plugin

You are now ready to launch the plugin. Find the entry in the plugins menu or click the atlas plugin button. You should see the following dialog.

You have to fill the form before clicking on Export to launch the rendering of the output maps. The options are :

Coverage layer

The name of the layer containing the coverage geometries

Hide coverage

If checked, the coverage layer itself will not be rendered on the output map

Composer template

Choose a template for output images. You can refresh the template list or show the selected template in the composer window

Composer map object

Item on the composer template where the map extent will be zoomed on each coverage. Use the tooltip over objects in the composer window to know the map item name

Margin around coverage

Amount of space around given coverage geometry. Default is 10% of coverage bounding box

Output directory

Location where the export writes the output images to

Filename pattern

Generic name of the output files. The final names will have a _n suffix before the extension, n being the image number (like basename_0.pdf). The pattern extension determines the output file type. The latter can be any image format (PNG, JPG...) or PDF.

Export

The export button launches the rendering process, writing output in the specified directory

Results

The results are written to the filesystem, with the file type specified in the filename pattern.

For example, PNG output :

And a PDF output example : We can notice that labels have been replaced by corresponding field values in the coverage layer.