Adding a custom shape to the map

The QGIS composer has an object for drawing and styling nonspatial shapes, including rectangles, ellipses, and triangles. In this recipe, we'll add some rectangles filled with different colors, which resemble a simple bar chart, as an example of using shapes.

Getting ready

Download the zipped shapefile for this map from https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/Mississippi.zip and extract it to your qgis_data directory in a subdirectory named ms.

We will also use the MapComposer library from https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/MapComposer.py, to simplify the creation of the map composition.

Place the file in the .qgis2/python directory within your home directory.

How to do it...

First, we ...

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