Posts Tagged “QGIS”

Getting to Know QGIS

Slashgeo linked to an incredible web-based QGIS tutorial last week.  I’ve been looking through it, and so far it is excellent.  It’s not really designed for total newbies – there are other places to get your very first introduction to a desktop GIS.  Instead, this tutorial seems to be aimed at those who are familiar […]

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Catching Bad Characters

When loading data into a PostGIS database using shp2pgsql, have you ever gotten this cryptic error? Unable to convert data value to UTF-8 (iconv reports “Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character”). Current encoding is “UTF-8”. Try “LATIN1” (Western European), or one of the values described at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/multibyte.html. This means that there is an invalid […]

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A Difference of Projections

If you divide your time between ArcGIS and QGIS, you may have noticed that they don’t use the exact same projections.  For Northern Colorado, for example, ArcGIS offers “NAD 1983 HARN StatePlane Colorado North FIPS 0501”, while the best QGIS can do is “NAD83(HARN) / Colorado North”.  When projection information doesn’t agree exactly, I get […]

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