Qgis

At some point, every mechanical or civil engineer gets handed a shapefile or GeoJSON and told to “do something with it.” Usually it is site boundary data for a facility layout, parcel boundaries for a land survey, drone-acquired point cloud footprints, or utility infrastructure from a municipal dataset. None of these came from SolidWorks or AutoCAD. They came from GIS, and they arrived in a format you may never have opened before. ...

The EU Deforestation Regulation applies from 30 December 2026. For operators placing timber, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy, cattle, and rubber on the EU market, compliance requires a Due Diligence Statement submitted through the TRACES NT system. That statement must include plot-level geolocation data — and the format specification is not flexible. TRACES accepts GeoJSON in WGS84 (EPSG:4326) with coordinates expressed as decimal degrees to at least six decimal places. Plots over 4 hectares require a complete boundary polygon. Plots under 4 hectares may be represented by a single point. ...

A Reddit thread in r/gis titled “ZIP codes are a bad spatial abstraction” accumulated 34 upvotes and substantial agreement. The comments covered reasons ranging from USPS policy to census methodology. The frustration is real: analysts keep getting results that don’t survive peer review, and the problem is usually the spatial unit, not the statistics. ZIP codes are the default because they appear in every address dataset and everyone understands them intuitively. Neither of those properties makes them good for spatial analysis. ...

Safe Software’s partial acquisition by a private equity firm in early 2024 triggered price increases that blindsided teams that had built their GIS infrastructure around FME. Users in the community forums reported annual maintenance increases ranging from substantial to a 400% jump for some license tiers. The reaction was predictable: teams that could absorb the cost renewed; teams that couldn’t started auditing what FME was actually doing for them. What most found: the majority of their FME usage was format translation and straightforward transformation chains — work that GDAL, Python, and QGIS can handle without a license fee. The minority was complex branching pipelines and proprietary format readers that have no drop-in replacement. ...

Most municipalities and utility contractors have their underground infrastructure documented somewhere — in CAD as-built drawings, in PDFs, in someone’s head. Getting it into a proper GIS layer is the difference between calling 811 and hoping versus knowing where a 6-inch water main runs before you start excavating. QGIS handles this well. It’s free, it imports CAD files, and it exports GeoPDF files that field crews can use offline on a tablet. The setup isn’t complicated, but there are decisions you need to make before you start drawing — particularly around file format, CRS, and attribute schema — that determine whether the data is useful for the next 20 years or becomes another file nobody trusts. ...

If you’re moving from ArcGIS Pro to QGIS, Attribute Rules are one of the first things you’ll miss. ArcGIS Pro’s Attribute Rules let you attach Arcade scripts to a geodatabase layer that fire automatically on edit — calculating fields, enforcing constraints, validating records. QGIS has equivalents for all three categories, but they work differently, and none of them are geodatabase-level rules that execute independently of the client application. This matters: QGIS’s field rules live in the project file, not the data source. If someone opens your GeoPackage or Shapefile in a different QGIS project — or in a different GIS tool — those rules don’t travel with the data. That’s a significant architectural difference from ArcGIS Pro, where rules are stored in the geodatabase and enforced by the database engine. ...

If you’re still reaching for Shapefile or GeoJSON as your default format for large static datasets, FlatGeobuf is worth understanding. It’s been in GDAL since version 3.1 (2020) and QGIS since 3.16 — but most teams still haven’t adopted it where it provides the clearest advantage: large datasets served from cloud storage. Here’s what it does, how its internals work, and where it outperforms the alternatives. What FlatGeobuf Is FlatGeobuf is a binary encoding for vector geographic data built on FlatBuffers, a cross-platform serialization library developed at Google. A FlatGeobuf file has four sections in fixed order: ...

TL;DR: If your QGIS buffer is the wrong size, your CRS is EPSG:4326 (degrees) — switch to a projected CRS (e.g. a local UTM zone) before buffering, or enable the Geodesic Distance option in the QGIS 3.28+ Buffer dialog. The QGIS Buffer tool has one requirement that is easy to miss: the distance you enter is in the unit of the layer’s CRS, not the unit of your project CRS, and not any intuitive real-world unit you might have in mind. ...

Drop a DXF file onto your GIS and the geometry lands in the middle of the ocean, rotated 90 degrees, scaled by 25.4. Or it lands in the right country but offset by a few hundred metres. Or it imports cleanly into QGIS but every feature ends up on a single layer called “0” with no attributes beyond the original AutoCAD entity type. This is not a bug you can fix with a setting. The CAD-GIS format gap is structural. DWG and DXF were designed for engineering drawings, not for placing things on Earth. GIS formats were designed for the opposite. The two worlds have different answers to three fundamental questions: where are these objects, what do we know about them, and how do they relate to each other? ...

A shapefile arrives in your inbox, or you need to verify what’s in a .shp file before importing it into your pipeline. The two questions that come up immediately: what software do you need, and do you have to install anything? The short answer: no install required for a quick look. For anything involving CRS inspection, attribute filtering, or geometry validation, a desktop tool is worth the effort. What You’re Actually Inspecting A shapefile isn’t a single file — it’s a bundle that requires at least four components to be useful: ...