March '16 Meetup Minutes

Covered topics:

• QGIS Cartographic Shortcuts
• Future topics

QGIS Cartographic Shortcuts

• Evan Derickson gave an awesome presentation on QGIS Cartographic Shortcuts.
  • Wanted to recreate ESRI cartography with QGIS
  • Hillshade
    • Old technique: % transparency
    • QGIS:
      • Blend Mode
        • Borrowed from graphics software
        • Doing math from the two layers
        • Multiply: makes the shadows darker, never lighter
        • Contrast Enhancement in the Hillshades Layer Properties-Style - Stretch to Min Max
          • Set the Max to the peak band in the histogram
          • This reduces the areas that are darkened. So the areas that would have a little darkening wont have any.
        • Soft-light: brightens and darkens
    • ESRI now has a Swiss Method that Evan is trying to emulate with multiple angle hill-shades
    • Natural Earth has some great manual hillshades at small scale.
  • Glow Effects
    • Doesn’t like to do just line borders on his polygons
    • Polygon layer properties - Style - Draw Effects check-box => Effect properties
      • Inner Glow
      • Inner Shadow
  • Vignetting
    • You can load and save files from the style button in the Layer Properties - Style
    • Switch from simple fill to shapeburst fill
    • Many settings to adjust
    • Can ignore rings if you don’t want islands to affect the vignetting
    • Blurring at almost full strength gave a good effect
  • Inverted Polygons
    • Layer Properties - Inverted Polygons instead of Single Polygons
      • Sub renderer controls how everything outside your selected polygons is symbolized.
  • Inner Borders
    • Allows coincident boundaries of adjacent polygons and symbolizes them according to polygon attributes
    • Outline for polygon is “Outline: Simple line” instead of “Simple line”, then draw line only inside polygon
  • Rule Based Labeling & styles
    • Can do different labels on locator map and main map despite them both pointing at the same map.
    • Set scale ranges in the layer properties labels
    • Can control entire layers with scale maxes and mins for the layer
    • Can control symbology by changing single symbol to rule-based in layer properties - style

Ideas for future meetups

• Geo Packages - Stu
• QGIS Map Packages - Stu
• Time Manager - Stu
• Web Mapping - group
• Q Field - Stu