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.

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