cartography – North Road

Posted on October 11, 2023Integrations, QGIS, Web Mapping

QGIS Add to Felt Plugin – Phase 2

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: 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. Map […]

Posted on August 24, 2023August 25, 2023Integrations, Partners, QGIS

Soar.Earth Digital Atlas QGIS Plugin

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, […]

Posted on November 4, 2022November 16, 2023Cartography, QGIS

Creating circular insets and other fun QGIS layout tricks

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 […]

Posted on September 9, 2022QGIS

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” […]

Posted on October 21, 2021May 13, 2024QGIS

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 […]

Posted on September 3, 2020January 4, 2021QGIS

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 […]

Posted on September 26, 2019January 4, 2021QGIS

QGIS Print Layouts Graphs and Charts — Beta Out Now!

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 […]

Posted on September 3, 2019October 9, 2024QGIS

QGIS 3.10 Loves Geospatial PDF!

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 […]

Posted on April 5, 2019January 4, 20211 CommentQGIS

QGIS (and SLYR!), now with Hash Lines support

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 […]

Posted on July 28, 2017January 4, 20214 CommentsQGIS

QGIS layouts rewrite – progress report #1

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. […]