[Qgis-user] How to display a scale bar in km on a map in degrees?

[Philippe Puig]

I am the poster of this question and I want to thank all those who took the
time to answer it.

 

My problem is not trivial for two reasons:

-          I work in the Northern Territory (NT), in Australia. The western
part of the NT is in UTM zone 52 and the eastern part in UTM zone 53;

-          maps I create often straddle the zone 52/zone 53 boundary and
cannot be in m using our standard projections; 

-          most baseline GIS work in the Northern Territory is carried out
by the Government in ArcGIS. ArcGIS allows to display a  scale bar in km on
a map in degrees and therefore most map users here expect to have a km scale
bar on degrees maps.

 

I work for a small independent organisation focused on natural resource
management. 

I decided that our GIS would be entirely based on freeware.

I chose QGIS as our main GIS software.

 

As I am often expected to emulate ArcGIS, the scale bar issue matters to me.


Now I know that QGIS does not offer the km scale bar  possibility offered by
ArcGIS.

 

I will therefore use a work around  consisting in creating grids of suitable
mesh size (eg 100 km) in both UTM 52 and UTM 53.  I will then reproject them
in DA94  (the Australian standard degrees CRS) and merge them in GA 94 as a
single grid which I will use as a guide to create (approximate) km scale
bars in my GDA94 maps.    

 

Philippe

 

 

 

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