The Coastal Vignette
Occasionally on old maps you may see a pleasing decorative effect on bodies of water called a “Coastal Vignette”, these are fine lines that highlight coastlines and lake shores. The example seen above...
View ArticleNautical Charts in QGIS – The Compass Rose
Before the advent of shipborne satellite navigation systems, navigation at sea required three precise measurements – Solar or Stellar Declination for Latitude, Time at Greenwich for Longitude and True...
View ArticleAdding ESRI’s Online World Imagery Dataset to QGIS
ESRI’s ArcGIS Online World Imagery is a high resolution satellite and aerial imagery base map for use in Google Earth, ArcMap and ArcGIS Explorer. The same excellent imagery is used by the Bing Maps...
View ArticleCreate great looking hillshaded maps in QGIS
In this tutorial I will show you how to create a Hillshaded topographic map in QGIS. We will be using Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data, a near global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) collected...
View ArticleCreating a Tissot’s Indicatrix in QGIS
The task of projecting, or unfolding the spherical Earth onto a flat map, is an age old problem in cartography. Projection almost always introduces distortion, most projections cannot preserve angles,...
View ArticleUsing Trigonometry To Place And Orientate Labels
Geologists display the dip and strike of rock layers on geological maps using a dip and strike symbol, where dip in degrees indicates the maximum angle a rock layer descends relative to the horizontal....
View ArticleAdding ESRI’s World Hillshade layer to QGIS
You may have seen my earlier tutorial where I described how to make nice looking hillshaded maps in QGIS using SRTM elevation data. Well, we don’t have to stop with just one hillshade layer on a map,...
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