Tag: composer

Posted on Cartography, 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 […]

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Posted on QGIS

Exploring Reports in QGIS 3.0 – the Ultimate Guide!

In 2017 North Road ran a crowd funding campaign for extending QGIS’ Print Composer and adding a brand new reporting framework to QGIS. Thanks to numerous generous backers, this campaign was a success. With the final QGIS 3.0 release just around the corner, we thought this was a great time to explore the new reporting engine and what it offers. We’ll start with a relatively simple project, containing some administrative boundaries, populated places, ports and airports. Using the “Project” – “New Report” command, we then create a new blank report. Initially, there’s not much to look at – the dialog which is displayed looks much like the QGIS 3.0 Layout Designer, except for the new “Report Organizer” panel shown on […]

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Posted on 4 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. […]

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Posted on QGIS

QGIS Layout and Reporting Engine Campaign – a success!

Thanks to the tireless efforts and incredible generosity of the QGIS user community, our crowdfunded QGIS Layout and Reporting Engine campaign was a tremendous success! We’ve reached the funding goal for this project, and as a result QGIS 3.0 will include a more powerful print composer with a reworked code base. You can read more about what we have planned at the campaign page. We’d like to take this opportunity to extend our heartfelt thanks to all the backers who have pledged to support this project: The Swiss QGIS User group (funded preliminary work in refactoring how compositions are handled and stored within projects) The QGIS Grant Program (2016) (funded preliminary work allowing for a flexible property framework which will be […]

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Posted on 1 CommentQGIS

QGIS Composer Rewrite and Layout Engine crowdfund launched!

At North Road we believe that crowdfunding is a sustainable way to maintain and enhance open source software, like the QGIS open source GIS package. We’ve run a number of successful crowdfunding campaigns in the past, including support in QGIS for live layer effects, a point cluster renderer, and a unique value renderer for raster layers. Now, we’re proud to announce our latest crowd funding endeavour, and our biggest to date, the QGIS Layout and Reporting Engine Campaign. This campaign covers stage 1 of a large, ongoing project to modernise and expand on QGIS’ print composer and layout facilities. Over time QGIS’ composer functionality has grown extensively and now is capable of creating flexible, high quality cartographic outputs. However, we’ve now hit […]

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