README for QGIS ---------------------------------------- Quantum GIS (QGIS) is an Open Source Geographic Information System. The project was born in May of 2002 and was established as a project on SourceForge in June of the same year. We've worked hard to make GIS software (which is traditionally expensive commercial software) a viable prospect for anyone with basic access to a Personal Computer. QGIS currently runs on most Unix platforms, Windows, and OS X. QGIS is developed using the Qt toolkit (http://qt.digia.com) and C++. This means that QGIS feels snappy to use and has a pleasing, easy to use graphical user interface. QGIS aims to be an easy to use GIS, providing common functions and features. The initial goal was to provide a GIS data viewer. QGIS has reached that point in its evolution and is being used by many for their daily GIS data viewing and editing needs. QGIS supports a number of raster and vector data formats, with new support easily added using the plugin architecture. QGIS is released under the GNU Public License (GPL) Version 3. Developing QGIS under this license means that you can (if you want to) inspect and modify the source code and guarantees that you, our happy user will always have access to a GIS program that is free of cost and can be freely modified. Supported raster formats include: Grass USGS DEM ArcInfo binary grid ArcInfo ASCII grid ERDAS Imagine SDTS GeoTiff Tiff with world file Supported vector formats include: ESRI Shapefiles PostgreSQL/PostGIS GRASS Spatialite Other OGR supported formats NOTE -- Please follow the installation instructions carefully. After extracting the distribution, you can find the HTML version of the installation document in qgis/doc/index.html. The installation document is also available as PDF in the same directory. HELP US -- Please submit bug reports using the QGIS bug tracker at: http://hub.qgis.org/ When reporting a bug, either login or, if you don't have a qgis trac, provide an email address where we can request additional information. SUPPORT - You can get support in the following ways: 1. Using the QGIS community site at http://qgis.org 2. Joining the qgis-users mailing list at: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user 3. Using IRC by joining the #qgis channel on irc.freenode.net. Please wait around for a response to your question as many folks on the channel are doing other things and it may take a while for them to notice your question. QGIS is on GitHub at http://github.com/qgis/Quantum-GIS. If you wish to contribute patches you can fork the project, make your changes, commit to your repository, and then issue a pull request. The development team can then review your contribution and commit it upstream as appropriate. See http://help.github.com/forking/ and http://help.github.com/pull-requests/ for more details.