I have a number of polygons in a layer (old rehabilitation areas) and want to be able to selectively bring one to top and use this to cut a hole in the others and fill this with the cutting polygon information (rework rehabilitation). Is this easy to do in QGIS? I know I can use the add ring to put a hole in a single polygon but this uses a drawn polygon (selection of a polygon to use for cutting not available?) and produces an actual hole; similiarly add feature requires the digitising of a polygon. So I require the following:
1) Selectively bring a polygon to the top (is there a bring to front function?)
2) Select the now top polygon to use as a cutter
3) Cut top polygon shape out of underlying polys, this hole to be filled with cutting poly info. Thus leave a layer containing non-overlapping polygons.
UPDATE. I've found I can get this to work using using the Difference tool.
1) Separate the overlying polygons into their own layer
2) Make base polygon layer editable
3) Use the Difference tool to cut out the overlying polygon shapes in the base polygons
4) Copy and paste the overlying polygons into the base cutouts
Is there a quicker way? Also can this be done easily in ArcGIS? Thanks.
Best Answer
1) Separate the overlying polygons into their own layer 2) Make base polygon layer editable 3) Use the Difference tool to cut out the overlying polygon shapes in the base polygons 4) Copy and paste the overlying polygons into the base cutouts