Take the 2-minute tour ×  I have been trying to figure this out
for a couple weeks now and have had no luck getting the buffer
tool to accept anything but degrees as units of measure.  I have
found lots of stuff saying the layer needs to be reprojected and
saved but it hasn't worked at all for me. Is there a way I could
create a buffer without using ftools or at least force the units
to meters somehow?  As a workaround I converted meters to
degrees (lat) and used that but the final product needs to be as
close to reality as possible.  Things I've tried:    • setting
every unit option I could find to meters (where possible).   •
setting everything to NAD83/Maryland (data is for Washington,
DC) and saving it as such (as layers in ESRI shape files).   •
reimporting the reprojected layers   • setting relevant layers
to Google Mercator  The was tried followed by creating a buffer.
Many were tried in combination. QGIS 1.7.3 Slackware64 current
(qgis from SBo-13.37 repo, tried on multilib and plain 64it with
same re