Styling water layers

Question

I'm trying to create a style for a vector shapefile that matches a raster map. I have detailed information about the different attributes and much of the layers are easy to style but there are one main problem that I've run into.

Please look at the attached image. Here I'm showing the same area with different layer styles. Picture 1 shows only the raster image. The arrow points to a diffuse shoreline in the raster map. It should have a blue fill with a dashed border like in picture 2.

The problem is that not only the shoreline gets the dashed border but the border that is located in the water also. When I fill the other water areas with a blue fill and a thin blue border it looks like picture 3.

So my question is how can I get rid of the borders that are out in the water? Can I fix that with styles in some way?

Answer 1

Assuming all the water pieces are in the same layer:

Water:

Blue:

No boundary:

Set boundary color to the same as fill

Width to 0.2 so the gaps are filled.

Dashed boundary:

New fill.

"Outline: Simple line"

Strike width must be bigger than 0.2.

Finally from fill, choose Advaced>Symbol levels:

Give the dashed layer a lower numbed than the interior fill, it will be rendered first with the in fill on top:

Result:

As detailed in:

Polygon Outlines in QGIS