QGIS – ATLAS Printing

By David Crowther

Question:

How do you create an ATLAS Print using QGIS?

 Answer:

ATLAS printing allows you to automatically create print output for all the features in a specific Layer. For example below we will demonstrate how to generate a PDF print booklet of all the UK Counties.

 Firstly, add the layers to your QGIS Project e.g. UK Counties. Then label the Counties and add a basemap e.g. OpenStreetMap.

From the Project menu choose > New Print Layout. Then within the new Print Layout choose the Add Item menu and add the Map, a Scale Bar and a Label (Text box) as the title.

From the Item Pane on the right choose the ATLAS Tab and tick Generate an Atlas.

Set the Counties as the Coverage Layer and Sort By the File_Name (County) field.

Now in the Map Item Properties, set the Map Scale that you wish to print to e.g. 1:350,000. To ensure that all Counties are printed at the same scale in the Main Properties tick Controlled by Atlas and choose Fixed Scale.

Finally we can update the Map Title (Label) of each output Map by Inserting an Expression which utilises the County Name.

In the Expression builder we will simply choose the Field which contains the Name of the County – File_Name.

When Inserted the Title Label will now look like this.

We can now preview the ATLAS before sending it to print. From the Atlas menu choose Preview Atlas.

Use the Arrows to navigate through the different Atlas pages.

If needed edit the Title, Scale bar or maybe the Scale options. For example, instead of Fixed Scale for each feature you may wish to choose Margin around feature – 10%.

Once complete, you can either Print the Atlas to a printer or choose Atlas and Export to PDF. Having chosen a location and name for the Atlas PDF the export will begin:

Once the process is complete, open the ATLAS PDF file and click through the pages for each feature in your layer.