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I'm attempting to measure the distance of a series of points from a smaller number of polygons. As a first step, I've changed the polygons into points along their border, via the

Vector> Geometry Tools> Extract Nodes

command. This gives me the following result, after I've manually deleted irrelevant borders.

Image

It's now my intention to export these points' coordinates into R to do some rudimentary neighbor and distance calculations. But when I open the attribute table, all the points representing the borders of the separate regions share a single geographic coordinate (which appears to approximate the polygon's centroid, but that's a guess). It's like the following:

Image2

Is there a different way to convert a polygon's borders to points, and recover the points' coordinates themselves?

Thanks

Brad Nesom
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tomw
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1 Answers1

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Coordinates in the attribute table do not get updated automatically when the geometry of the feature changes. You need to update them manually:

  • Enable editing of the points layer
  • Open the attribute table
  • Open the field calculator
  • Update the INTPTLON and INTPTLAT fields using the expressions "$x" and "$y" respectively (they're in the Geometry group).

You may also be interested in the 'Hub Distance' tool in the mmqgis plugin: http://michaelminn.com/linux/mmqgis/

Snorfalorpagus
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  • brilliant, this worked perfectly. thanks!

    I had separately looked at the Hub Distance command, but (to my superficial understanding) it looked as if that measures distance between a point and a polygon's centroid, where I need the distance between a polygon and the closest border of a polygon. Is my understanding of this function faulty?

     – tomw Apr 21 '13 at 00:33