I am a complete loss when attempting to use QGIS to produce a csv file of points as latitude and longitude from shapefile data so that I can plot them on gores for a small world globe. All my attempts have resulted in just a list of consecutive numbers in a column. The data I have chosen has 250 points and that will be ideal for my purpose, a 55mm diameter globe to illustrate a talk on Mercator and the Ordnance Survey
I am using the data from http://openstreetmapdata.com/data/generalized-coastlines The shapefile set is the set from coastlines_z1 ...
with extensions .dbf .prj .shp .shx
I have tried to follow the instructions for QGIS in this reference,
1) Add a new layer
2) use the file coastlinesz1.shp
3) toggle editing
4) open the layer’s attribute table
At this point the table has only one column with the numbers 0 to 249 in it.
Somewhere along this process I have obviously made at least one mistake, please can anyone tell me where?.
I am sure that more will be needed, but there is a plethora of information out there and deciding what is relevant is beyond me at the moment.