[Qgis-user] to line or not to line

[Gerhardus Geldenhuis]

Hi
This question is not as much QGIS specific but more about generic GIS
concepts.

In all of the tutorials I have watched so far rivers is represented as
lines. This makes sense and if you were to do later analysis I would imagine
a line would make it easier to get information like the length of all rivers
in an area. However rivers do not play nice and have varying widths. I could
adjust the line width but that would only be accurate for a certain part of
the river. My question is thus how do you represent a river of any feature
for that matter, of varying width and substantial length. If the river is a
polygon then I would loose the ability to extract length data or is that
assumption wrong? Do I represent a river/feature as both a line and a
polygon then?

Regards

-- 
Gerhardus Geldenhuis
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