Styling

GISOwl provides a powerful visual style editor for customizing how layers appear on the map.

Opening the Style Editor

Click a layer name in the Layers panel, then click the paint brush icon or press S. The style editor opens in the right panel.

Point Styles

  • Simple markers — Choose color, size, and opacity. Pick from circles, squares, diamonds, or custom SVG icons.
  • Categorized — Assign a different color or icon per unique value in a column (e.g., one color per building type).
  • Graduated — Scale marker size or color intensity based on a numeric column (e.g., population, revenue).
  • Heatmap — Render point density as a smooth color gradient.
  • Cluster — Group nearby points into clusters with counts.

Line Styles

Customize stroke color, width, opacity, and dash pattern. Apply graduated color ramps to numeric fields. Use line width to represent magnitude (e.g., traffic volume).

Polygon Styles

Set fill color, fill opacity, stroke color, and stroke width. Apply categorized or graduated fills. Add pattern fills (hatching, dots) for print-friendly maps.

Labels

Enable labels per layer. Choose the attribute column to display, font size, color, halo, placement (point, line, polygon centroid), and max zoom visibility.

Color Ramps

GISOwl includes built-in color ramps (sequential, diverging, qualitative) from ColorBrewer and Viridis families. You can also define custom color stops.

Saving Styles

Styles are saved with the map automatically. To reuse a style across maps, save it as a style template in your workspace library.

Next Steps