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QGIS 0.8 "Titan" Released

Quantum GIS, or QGIS, has released the final 0.8 version of their desktop mapping product.

QGIS is “…a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows.” It’s licensed under the GNU GPL, and has a lot of great features, including:

  • Support for PostGIS, shapefiles, ArcInfo coverages, Mapinfo, WMS, various raster formats, and a lot of other GDAL/OGR supported formats.
  • GRASS digitizing.
  • Feature labeling.
  • Vector and attribute editing.
  • Vector layer transparency and anti-aliasing.
  • Enhanced GRASS support and toolbox commands.
  • Lots more.
One of the best features for me is the enhanced MapServer map file generator. It won’t do everything, but it gets you a long way towards generating your map file without having to create the map file by hand.

A couple of gotchas if you want to generate MapServer map files from QGIS on Windows. First, you need to have Python 2.5 installed for it to work. Second, there’s a bug with the MapServer export module that will cause it to fail if there are spaces in the path to the QGIS folder, so rather than let it install to the default location (C:\Program Files\Quantum GIS), put it somewhere where there are no spaces (i.e. C:\QuantumGIS).