Sometime in 2020, I ordered the ArcGIS Home Program and ran it on some virtual machine I had sitting around. My problem is I have too much fun learning things on the open source side of the house so I didn’t use it a lot. As I look back I’m pretty sure I stayed in the ESRI world a good 25 years. I do miss it a little because it’s a skill set I’m slowly losing.
I say that to say this – I knew at some point it was going to be detrimental that I have ArcPro running on something somewhere. A client popped up last week and asked if I could open a ArcPro Template. I have everything at my disposal except ArcPro….BUT I do have the SLYR Plugin.
SLYR offers a path between the ESRI world and QGIS. It’s commercial. It costs about 1650 US Dollars. What do you get? A lot of tools. So many – not able to screenshot them all at once so check out the link at North Road above.
The Bonus is I can import a AcGIS Pro Template.
There are a few hiccups on import. Mainly because the first few times I did this I was missing fonts that windows had (I’m on Fedora linux) and once I had that sorted out it was all good. The only thing that didn’t import was dynamic text but that’s an easy fix. So at the end I have a new layout ready to go:
Overall it made life pretty easy and I didn’t have to reconstruct this in QGIS. Change a few defaults and I have the font/scalebar/date straight. There you go – Getting from ArcPro on Windows to QGIS on Linux.
So if you wanted to switch from one to the other? Convert your QGS files to APRX. Convert your APRX to QGS files. All with SLYR. Weird right?
