[OSM-talk] how to apply OSM styles to maps using Quantum GIS

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Felipe Carrillo <mazatlanmexico <at> yahoo.com> writes:

> 
> Hi:
> Could someone point out to a step by step document where I can learn about map
styles? I am trying to map county
> roads and highways but my line shapes don't have any style and look plain. 

Hi,

I suppose you have downoaded OSM shapefiles and opened them with QGIS.  Now
select the layer and go through menu:
Layer - Properties - Symbology.

If you would like to colour highways according to their type (at least
Datafabrik shapes has this attribute) select next
Legend type= Unique value
Press Classify

You will see each road type coloured with unique colour.  You can change the
colours, delete classes if you do not want then all on your map, play with
styles etc. You can also save the style so you do not need to start from the
beginning each time.

If you want better scale dependent rendering you will need to split the
shapefile according to highway type so you can hide lower class roads while
zoomed far.  But creating styles with QGIS is very intuitive and you will learn
a lot by trial and error. 

Search from Yahoo! with words QGIS and style yields 50300 hits.  Perhaps you
could start from QGIS user guide http://qgis.sourceforge.net/docs/userguide.pdf

If you are trying to use QGIS OSM provider for editing OSM data directly I can't
say anything about how to change the default styles with it.

-Jukka-