Posted on QGIS

Crowd funding alert: Point Clouds, Elevation Profiles and 3D Map view improvements!

Together with our partners at Lutra Consulting and Hobu, we have once again have collated your feature requests for even MORE point cloud and QGIS elevation improvements and are ready to start working on them! Here’s a taster of what to expect if our latest crowd funding campaign is successful: Point cloud data management, transformation and analysis via incorporation of PDAL within the QGIS “Processing” toolbox Optimised handling of large datasets to speed up your 3D maps, including dynamic data loading for complex 3D scenes Combine multiple LAS/LAZ point cloud files into a single “virtual” point cloud for easy data management and display Elevation profile tool embedded into print layouts, totally customizable, more efficient and with the ability to export […]

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Posted on Core Feature Development, Data, Integrations, QGIS, Web Mapping

Securely accessing ArcGIS Online (AGOL) and enterprise ArcGIS Portal sites through QGIS (2022 update!)

We’re often contacted for advice regarding our recommendations for securely accessing content on ArcGIS Online (AGOL) or enterprise ArcGIS Portal deployments from within QGIS. While we ran through our recommended setup in an older post, we thought it was time for a 2022 update for our recommendations. In this version we’ve updated some of the descriptions and screenshots for newer QGIS releases, and have added explicit instructions on accessing ArcGIS Online content too. This post details step-by-step instructions in setting up both AGOL/ArcGIS Portal and QGIS to enable this integration. First, we’ll need to create an application on the server in order to enable QGIS users to securely authenticate with the server. The process for this varies between AGOL and […]

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Posted on QGIS

Mixed Format Labels in QGIS — coming soon!

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” […]

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Posted on QGIS

Introducing Annotation Layers in QGIS 3.22!

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 […]

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Posted on QGIS

Line Label Placement: Our gift to the QGIS community!

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 […]

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Posted on QGIS

Announcing the Point Cloud Data in QGIS Crowdfunding Campaign!

With the recent advancements in LiDAR survey technology and photogrammetry there has been a huge demand in capturing and storing point cloud data. Point cloud data are vector in nature, but are usually orders of magnitude larger than a standard vector layer. Typical vector datasets range from thousands to millions of features, while point clouds range from millions to billions or even trillions of points. Due to this sheer number of points a completely different approach to visualise, analyse and store point clouds is needed in a GIS platform. Integrating a point cloud viewer in a desktop GIS application adds a lot of value for users compared to a specialised and dedicated point cloud viewer: Point cloud data can be […]

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Posted on QGIS

Announcing SLYR Community Edition

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. […]

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Posted on QGIS

Securely accessing enterprise ArcGIS Portal sites through QGIS

An updated version of this guide is available! We were recently contacted for advice regarding our recommendations for securely accessing content on an enterprise ArcGIS Portal deployment from within QGIS. Fortunately, this setup is fully supported and works seamlessly in QGIS, thanks to the native integration of “OAuth2” authentication in QGIS! This post details step-by-step instructions in setting up both ArcGIS Portal and QGIS to enable this integration. First, we’ll create a new desktop application on the Portal site in order to obtain the application-specific access keys for OAuth2 authentication. We’ll then create an authentication configuration in QGIS and associate this with a connection to the Portal site. Let’s dive in by doing the Portal configuration first… Creating an application […]

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Posted on QGIS, SLYR

SLYR ESRI to QGIS compatibility suite – April 2020 update

Since the last update, our “SLYR” ESRI to QGIS compatibility suite has gained a ton of new functionality, including full support for conversion of ArcMap MXD documents (with page layouts!). In this update, we’ll explore some of the new functionality available in the tool — but instead of focusing solely on SLYR, this time we’ll also explore the enhancements we’ve been making in QGIS itself that have helped improve the quality of ArcMap document conversion. While many of these enhancements are already available to all users of QGIS 3.12, others are exciting additions to the upcoming QGIS 3.14 release. Let’s dive in! Improved legend customisation One shortcoming we realised early on during our work on SLYR was that QGIS map […]

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Posted on QGIS

QGIS Processing, Model Designer and ETL Campaign crowdfund launched!

QGIS Processing offers a rich and expandable set of algorithms which can operate on spatial data, along with a powerful Model Designer which allows users to string together these algorithms to create custom workflows. Since its introduction in QGIS 2, the Processing framework has seen an intensive amount of development and optimisation efforts. In recent QGIS releases it offers a very user-friendly way of performing complex spatial data processing tasks, all without requiring ANY expensive third-party tools or software licenses! At North Road we are passionate about the QGIS Processing framework, and have invested considerable effort in this framework over the past 5 years. We’re proud to announce that our latest crowd-funding campaign is focused on further expanding the capabilities and flexibility […]

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