2. 前言

Welcome to the wonderful world of Geographical Information Systems (GIS)!

QGIS is an Open Source Geographic Information System. The project was born in May 2002 and was established as a project on SourceForge in June the same year. We have worked hard to make GIS software (which is traditionally expensive proprietary software) available to anyone with access to a personal computer. QGIS currently runs on most Unix platforms, Windows, and macOS. QGIS is developed using the Qt toolkit (https://www.qt.io) and C++. This means that QGIS feels snappy and has a pleasing, easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI).

QGIS aims to be a user-friendly GIS, providing common functions and features. The initial goal of the project was to provide a GIS data viewer. QGIS has reached the point in its evolution where it is being used for daily GIS data-viewing needs, for data capture, for advanced GIS analysis, and for presentations in the form of sophisticated maps, atlases and reports. QGIS supports a wealth of raster and vector data formats, with new format support easily added using the plugin architecture.

QGIS is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Developing QGIS under this license means that you can inspect and modify the source code, and guarantees that you, our happy user, will always have access to a GIS program that is free of cost and can be freely modified. You should have received a full copy of the license with your copy of QGIS, and you can also find it in Appendix Appendix A: GNU General Public License.

小技巧

Up-to-date Documentation

The latest version of this document can always be found in the documentation area of the QGIS website at https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/.