GRASS and m.cogo

Mar 14, 2025 | QGIS

I hate putting in Deed calls. Some of you may call it Metes and Bounds. I usually even utter “Survey” as more of a curse than anything.

There’s always the Azimuth and Distance plugin but if you check the homepage you will see it’s basically on life support or as it’s called – maintenance mode. I did give it a shot and it got a bit flaky for me. So what to do?

GRASS!

There’s a nice tool in GRASS called m.cogo. It doesn’t do curves – it very no thrills BUT it will give you the corner coordinates. You can access the tool through QGIS or just use the native GRASS Interface.

You set up your calls in a text file and seperate them with colons. A 13 degree 55 minute and 2 second call that goes for 30 feet would be the first line below. I just gave it a lable called p001.

Crank up GRASS and run m.cogo (excuse the screenshot – I used a different file than the above one accidentally):

Your output – A text file:

which then gives you the corners. You just have to connect the dots so to speak after loading it back into QGIS as a delimited text file.

So it worked – I drew in my parcel but this was a bit more than I bargained for. What do you do when a plugin is in maintenance mode and your next best bit is a slightly confusing piece of software than you love….but no one will love it quite the same way.

I have a plan brewing – stay tuned.

You may also like

QGIS Offline Help

QGIS Offline Help

Through a long series of events I found myself teaching QGIS in a classroom again. It's been a while. I used to just "hold" classes and sometime during the pandemic I jsut stopped. Occasionally I'll get a call for 3 or 4 people that want training but generally I've...

The online training website that I hardly talk about

The online training website that I hardly talk about

I had mentioned it some but it's probably been coming up on 6 months since I even mentioned training. Right before I decided to attempt to die in 2025 I had started building a training website at training.northrivergeographic.com. Basically it's my Intro to QGIS class...

QGIS Fun: Chickamauga Mound

QGIS Fun: Chickamauga Mound

I've been trying to stop once a week and do something fun with QGIS. Post Heart Incident I do a lot of walking. I've been re-exploring some places I used to go in town to exercise and one is the TN River Walk. I realized the other day I needed to do some OpenStreetMap...