I am working on displaying a road network with QGIS (2.4). Doing this I have a couple of layers, including a base network of roads, and my modified layer. All in all they become a huge network. Therefore when exporting the map, I decided to use the atlas function in QGIS. The approach is to make a vector grid bound by my road map, and each cell in the grid of a reasonable size for the desired level of detail.
All in all this process works well, except for that my map is rather irregular and doesn't really fill the vector grid area. To prevent a lot of empty and useless pages in the generated atlas, I started deleting empty cells. This process was significantly improved when I figured out that I could select the cells by rectangle instead of one by one, but is still extremely tedious because of the amount of cells and map detail that has to be examined.
My question is therefore if there exists a way to (more easily) delete all cells in the vector layer that do not bound or intersect features from my main layer?
Best Answer
I managed to solve the problem thanks to the comments provided by Michael! To make a vector grid for generating an atlas in QGIS that only has cells that contain features from the layer you want the atlas to detail, these steps can be followed:
At this point you should have a new vector grid layer that only has cells which contain/overlap features from the layer you want to create an atlas of. All that remains is to dispose of the intermediary vector grid layer that was created, change the style of the new vector grid layer to something you like, and use it for generating your atlas.