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I am trying to design a beautiful map using QGIS. There is a similar question here Seeking QGIS tutorials and web resources? but I would like to focus on "designing a map using QGIS".

I was looking for some tools, style database or tutorials to guide me. How to use label classes, expressions, and annotations? helped me a lot and OSM seems to look great: 1, 2. However I need to use my own shapefiles. Also there is Quantumnik. It could be a great help, however it prints map on another tab and I need it to be on the same with my QGIS project.

I am looking for a way to design a beautiful looking road map using basic QGIS tools, any resources on that?

underdark
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Mykolas Simutis
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    But I would rather leave this question more general, not including atributes... For more help in my case then lets focus only on roads. I have 8 shapefiles for roads, each of them for different road sizes. They all have such attributes as Name, number, type and directional. For me only Type and Name is important. – Mykolas Simutis Jun 01 '11 at 14:17

2 Answers2

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In Tomtom data for example, you have an attribute called frc that can be used to classify roads. The following setup will create a GoogleMaps-style roadmap with different styles for different zoom levels.

enter image description here

I've worked out a solution for Google-like labeling too, this time based on OSM data: http://underdark.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/guide-to-advanced-labeling-for-osm-roads/

enter image description here

More related posts:

underdark
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  • Thank you! For my case I would also add tip to use scale dependant rendering to add smaller roads only when zoomed in enough and have them pale before they go solid, but I guess it is quite obvious – Mykolas Simutis Jun 02 '11 at 06:05
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I have created a blog post on how I did, and just thought to share it here.. So here it is:

http://mikeongis.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/map-design-with-qgis/

Mykolas Simutis
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