Best digitising tool - in built tools so clunky

[Andrew james]

Hi everyone, 

CAD user here - I am starting to use QGIS daily and find the digitising very difficult - Can't trim or split/join lines easily. 

What do people do in general. Use a CAD style plugin or stick with the in built QGIS digitising tolls until you get used to them?

Cheers

Andrew

[Nathan Woodrow]

Hey Andrew,

Have you seen the Advanced Digitising panel (open with Ctrl+4)

It has a lot of cad like shortcuts. All the tools in that panel also have single key shortcuts to make it quicker.

- Nathan

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[Colin Mazengarb]

Andrew, agree with Nathan. Learn the QGIS tools and persevere. There are some strange behaviours at times and learning a few strategies is necessary. Is this any different from CAD?
Cheers
Colin

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[Andrew James]

Thanks Nathan, shortcuts would be good. Yes I saw advanced digitsing - doesn't seem very advanced

Thanks Colin will persevere. - Yes CAD is a learning curve. So is learning French or Japanese, and QGIS it seems ;) Just depends on how much time you have 👍👍👍 merci

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[John Bryant]

Hi Andrew, I hear where you're coming from. For me, getting my head around all these bits of functionality have made me see the light:

• Advanced Digitising toolbar
• Snapping toolbar (particularly tracing and topological editing)
• Advanced Digitising panel
• Shape Digitising toolbar
• per-layer Digitising properties (in the Layer Properties dialogue)
• Topology Checker (core plugin)
• (Anything else I've missed?)

Chuck in the massive array of processing algorithms (especially using "Edit Features in-place") and I would be hard pressed to find much missing at this point.

I've relied on discovering all this stuff serendipitously over the years, but I reckon a focused effort would turn a novice into a digitising power user pretty quickly :)

Cheers!

John  

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[Andrew James]

Thanks John, much appreciated - 

Going to try and get my head around it all, Cheers

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[Ia...@jcis.net.au]

I think QGIS digitising and for that matter georeferencing was designed by someone who has never has to do a lot of both.

 

As for CAD – I did two 28 hour AutoCAD courses and once you get the basic workflow down it is really easy to do precise shapes as well as dimensioning.

 

Cheers

 

Dr Iain Stuart

JCIS Consultants

 

P.O. Box 2397

Burwood North

NSW, 2134

(0413) 380116 (m)

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[Colin Mazengarb]

Further to this conversation, I will concede that digitising in QGIS or ArcGIS for that matter requires substantial learning and practice. Maybe CAD is better at it but I have never used a product of this type so cannot judge. 

However, one additional digitising tool not discussed on this thread so far is the Geology from points and lines plugin. The tool is applicable to more than just geology and allows for clean topology construction of polygons by focussing on drawing their boundaries and getting them correct in the first place. Overshoots of boundary lines are ignored which means no need to use the trim tool or even snapping in some instances. Clean line boundaries (overshoots removed) are created as a by-product.

Cannot comment about Iain's point regarding georeferencing better in CAD. However, there are 2 available tools in QGIS for this, that requires practice and some theoretical understanding, but they do work efficiently. The in-built georeferencer is great as one can iterate refining the accuracy each time without leaving a pile of intermediate images to clean up afterward. Georeferencing old maps, sketches and aerial photos as examples require different transformations and the georeferencer allows for this. Recently this tool has been extended to non-georeferenced vector data (e.g. some CAD files) making it super powerful. The Freehand raster georeferencer plugin is an alternate one that is best suited to simple plans (involving simple shifts, rotations and scaling)  and in image format only, rather than say aerial photos with their non-simple radial and topographic distortions that require different transformation approaches. 

In conclusion, having these tools in one software package along with the other amazing functionality of QGIS means I tent to persist with these for performing as many tasks as possible. While not perfect, in time they will improve if we keep supporting the project!

I hope this contribution helps the conversation.

Regards

Colin

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Subject: RE: [QGIS-Australia-User-Group] Best digitising tool - in built tools so clunky

 

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[Andrew James]

👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

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[Emma Hain]

Hi All

This sounds like this could be a great blog for the QGIS Au website.

Don't forget the numerous CAD plugins as well!

https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/tags/cad/

In particular, the QAD one. 

Kind regards

Em

Emma Hain — Product Manager/Senior GIS Analyst
em...@north-road.com

North Road Cartography • Development • Spatial Analysis north-road.com QGIS User Conference 2025 2-3 June, Norrköping, Sweden FOSS4G 2025 17-23 November, Auckland, New Zealand

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