I drove to NCGIS Thursday…and back. I think in total I did 600+ miles to give a presentation. Why? Well I promised and it gave me a bit of time to sit and think. Technically about 13 hours worth of time.

I did a “This is QGIS” talk at the conference. Four years ago maybe 1 person knew about the software. About 1/3 of the people in the room had either heard or used it in some form or fashion. A question came up about sharing symbology or Style Files (ArcGIS Terminolgy). ArcGIS has had a very long time to come up with a symbol for about everything – symbology in that software is feature rich. QGIS is a bit more lacking in that area. You can build anything you want given time – it’s just not pre-built in some cases. I did have a question “If people build symbology/styles can they share them?” to which I answered yes.

So I had a suggestion from one person: “If you built some APA (American Planning Association) Styles that would be a good thing”. Given that it’s raining currently I sat down and built one style. Now I’m not a planner by any stretch so if this is wrong help me fix it or if I’m on the wrong path point me by leaving a comment or emailing me. I hadn’t done this before and I needed the experience. So…….

Download: https://github.com/rjhale1971/QGIS_styles (Look to your lower right and click “Download Zip”).

Now for the fun part:

Open QGIS Settings -> Style Manager . You should see something like: Notice the very nice “Share” button at the bottom. Click it and you can import or export the XML (assuming you did happen to unzip the file you downloaded). Hint – Click Import and select the xml! Select all the styles. Click Import. And There you have it.

Assuming I have done this slightly right you now have an Activity Style from APA (taken from Here) . How did I do it? Well – I picked a style and exported it and opened it in a text editor and changed the appropriate lines to match the RGB Values. It’s not terrible hard. It looks a little like this:

There is no reason you can’t use the tools withing QGIS to build the style interactively. Anyway – I loaded the file on GitHub. So any corrections or changes will be instantly available. Assuming this is slightly right I might pull the other codes out of the PDF and post those.

Learn Share Symbolize!

Intro to QGIS Class is now online!