SLD Editor with GUI?

I did a lot of trial-error tests with SLD lately, and my sum up is

  • use Atlas Styler. They have problems with certificates (version 2.0), newest Java runtime refuses to launch the app, you have to adjust the security settings of Java, but its the only tool doing ALMOST all I expect it to do. Only filters (setting filter like Field='text' will become [Field = text] and this is invalid) are working some curious way. But else, the provided SLD works like charm with Geoserver.

  • Forget QGIS. It has error, when exporting styles with labels, the labels are not exported correctly, more here : http://hub.qgis.org/issues/9365 and many of the exported SLD didnt work for me at all. It uses different version of specification (newer) than Geoserver and many of the used tags end up unrecognized or unusable. Saving the style directly to postgis made my map unrenderable ...

  • For limited style editing, you can use GeoExplorer (part of OpenGeo Suite), runs on same webserver as Geoserver and can provide some basic SLD editing. Forget about advanced styles like SVG with variable URL, even shapes and marks as polygon fill, only plain color. But for some work, it is enough and its pretty straightforward.


QGIS has a OpenGeo Explorer (for GeoServer) plug-in that you can create new SLD styles based on your feature symbology, then push to your server.

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You may also use uDig web GIS app. to pull in PostGIS layers, then copy out the .xml sld text which you may paste within GeoServer SLD styling editor.


Just an update to point out uDig documentations and tutorials to work with styles:

  • uDig Online User Help for Style Editor
  • On OSGeo Live Virtual Machine you can easily test the Open Source GIS stack
  • at Youtube you can find several Tutorials showing how to work with uDig to change Styles