Creating a mapbook

A mapbook is an automatically-generated document, which can also be called an atlas. A mapbook takes a dataset and breaks it down into smaller, detailed maps based on a coverage layer that zooms the larger map to each feature in the coverage in order to make a page of the mapbook. The coverage layer may or may not be the same as the map layer featured on each page of the mapbook. In this recipe, we'll create a mapbook that features all the countries in the world.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you need to download the world countries dataset from https://geospatialpython.googlecode.com/svn/countries.zip and put it in a directory named shapes within your qgis_data directory.

Next, you'll need to install the PyPDF2 library. On Linux or OS X, just open a console and run the following command:

sudo easy_install PyPDF2

On Windows, open the OSGEO4W console from your start menu and run this:

easy_install PyPDF2

Finally, in your qgis_data directory, create a folder called...