Share your results with qgis2leaf

As we are often use geodata and analyse, store them or visualize them using a GIS we depend somehow on the person on the other side to understand how a GIS functions or how to use the GIS. A webmap- like the well know google maps- is therefore an easy way to communicate your data and results. But creating a webmap is not always a funny thing to do as we are more geoscientists than programmers. QGIS2leaf for QGIS is a great plugin for creating a basic webmap.

what it does

At the moment, QGIS2leaf is an experimental plugin for the geographic information system QGIS (version 2.0 and above) that creates a webmap from your current vector layers (points, lines and polygons) in QGIS:

A QGIS project with different layers and several projections

In it’s current version (you can follow/influence the development by looking and commenting on github) you can define the used basemap (like using OpenStreetMap), the dimension of the webmap and the initial extent.
The whole webmap is stored in one folder and you can see the results in the browser of your choice as long as it is chrome/firefox/safari or opera. The folder structure is quite simple and it allows you to zip it and send it to another person without the need to install a GIS on the recipient side. Of course you can copy the whole folder to a folder with web-access so everyone on the web can see your data:

leaflet based webmap from your QGIS data

The best part: the plugin cares about your projection of the data and the file type as well as it uses ogr2ogr to transform your vector data to a file type leaflet (the JavaScript library it uses for the webmap) understands

what we plan

Unfortunately the plugin uses the standard style of leaflet. We plan to enhance it so it uses the current design of the layers in QGIS. Furthermore we would like to make it more customizable so you can interactively choose the layers to be exported. If you find any other things, that should be part of this plugin: Visit our page on github and create an issue so we can talk about your ideas. Of course the usage of the plugin is for free as well as the plugin itself. You can get the latest version by downloading it here. You may also find some opinions here.

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