Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time digitising in QGIS 2.8.1 lately so thought I’d list some of my top tips for those doing the same (and dont forget the QGIS Manual)!

• make sure to put the “Digitizing” and “Digitizing Tools” on the toolbar
• “Toggle Editing” allows you to edit the layer currently highlighted in the ToC
• the appropriate geometry will be selected, allowing you to add/edit points, lines or polygons
• click “Add Feature” then left-click in your layer to start digitising. If its a line or polygon, you right click to finish your feature
• middle press (scroll wheel) to pan around the image and rotate the scroll wheel to zoom in/out. Alternatively press the spacebar to allow the mouse to pan. PgUp/Dn to zoom.
• Settings->Snapping Options allows you to set the snapping options (doh!). This is important for digitising features with shared boundaries to stop sliver polygons. From the snapping mode drop-doown, select Advanced - for polygons you will now get an option to “Avoid Intersections”. This will allow any overlapping polygons to share the same boundary. For lines I “snap to segments” at a tolerance of 5 pixels
• Settings->Options->Digitizing allows you to set other options. I tick “Suppress attribute form pop-up after feature creation” to allow me just to digitize features - if you want to enter attribute data then you might want to untick them.
• you can edit vertices by clicking the Node Tool on the toolbar. Ctrl and left mouse click to select a vertex and double click to add a vertex. You can also delete a selected vertex (delete button) and move it (left click and drag)
• don’t forget to click “Toggle editing” again when you’ve finished to turn it off and save your edits!