Frequently Asked Questions

What is mapnik?

Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. It's written in C++ and there are Python bindings to facilitate fast-paced agile development. It can comfortably be used for both desktop and web development, which was something I wanted from the beginning.

Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It uses the AGG library and offers world class anti-aliasing rendering with subpixel accuracy for geographic data. It is written from scratch in modern C++ and doesn't suffer from design decisions made a decade ago. When it comes to handling common software tasks such as memory management, filesystem access, regular expressions, parsing and so on, Mapnik doesn't re-invent the wheel, but utilises best of breed industry standard libraries from boost.org

Which platforms does it run on? What about Mac and Windows?

At the moment only Linux OS is supported. However there is no reason why mapnik cannot be run on win32 or mac (or anything else for that matter). It is one of the project goals to make Mapnik a cross platform library. If you have experience and want to accelerate this process, feel free to join in.

UPDATE Starting from 0.4 Mapnik runs on Linux, Mac OS X (10.4.9), Win32 and FreeBSD

What data formats are supported?

At the time of writing mapnik can read ESRI shapes, PostGIS and TIFF raster. More data access plug-ins will be available in the future. If you cannot wait and/or like coding in C++, why not write your own data access plug-in?

What are the plans for the future?

As always, there are lots of things in the pipeline.