Using an outline for font markers

Font markers open up broad possibilities for icons, but a single-color shape can be hard to see across a varied map background. Recently, QGIS added the ability to place outlines around font marker symbols. In this recipe, we'll use font marker symbol methods to place an outline around the symbol to give it contrast and, therefore, visibility on any type of background.

Getting ready

Download the following zipped shapefile. Extract it and place it in a directory named ms in your qgis_data directory:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/tourism_points.zip

How to do it...

This recipe will load a layer from a shapefile, set up a font marker symbol, put an outline on it, and then add it to the layer. We'll use a simple text character, an @ sign, as our font marker to keep things simple:

1. First, we need to import the QtGUI library, so we can work with color objects:

           from PyQt4.QtGui import * 
   

2. Now, we create a path string to our shapefile...