qgis – Page 2 – North Road

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 August 24, 2020January 4, 2021QGIS

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 […]

Posted on August 5, 2020January 4, 2021QGIS

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. […]

Posted on June 4, 2020September 16, 2022QGIS

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 […]

Posted on April 28, 2020November 16, 2023QGIS, 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 […]

Posted on January 20, 2020January 4, 2021QGIS

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 […]

Posted on November 6, 2019November 16, 2023QGIS, SLYR

SLYR ESRI to QGIS compatibility suite – November 2019 update

It’s a been a month full of huge improvements since the last update, and we have some exciting news to share about our SLYR ESRI to QGIS compatibility suite. With the recently published plugin version 3.7, MXD conversion has moved from a “beta” state to being fully supported and available out-of-the-box for all users! Based on our massive library of reference files (almost 10,000 files covering a huge range of ArcGIS versions and features!), the tool is now able to successfully convert 96% of LYR files and 94.5% of MXD documents. This is a significant milestone, and with it we decided that MXD conversion support is now stable enough to move out of its previous beta state. Aside from this […]

Posted on November 5, 2019January 4, 2021QGIS

QGIS Print Layouts Graphs and Charts Campaign – Complete!

Last week saw the exciting release of version 3 of the QGIS DataPlotly plugin, which incorporates all the work done as a result of our Print Layouts Graphs and Charts crowdfunding campaign crowd funding campaign. Now, beautiful charts and graphs are available directly within QGIS print layouts, and all it takes is the easy installation of the “DataPlotly” plugin from your QGIS install! In this post we’ll showcase the functionality which has been added during this campaign, and which is available today in the plugin. UI modernisation and tweaks First up, during our work on this plugin we’ve invested some time in refreshing the plugin’s UI to ensure it follows all the widget conventions used elsewhere in QGIS. Now, the […]