October archive

Mapnik News

October 30, 2006

Well overdue, but here is some exciting news. Aaron Mitti and Vincent Spader have joined the Mapnik development team and done a brilliant job improving text rendering. As a result we now have 'follow line' text placement and 'ShieldSymbolizer - combined label/text - very useful for things like motorways. A big thank-you to Aaron and Vince!

I've created a couple of 'Google Maps' demos to demonstrate these and other new features:

The first uses datasets from GeoGratis (Canada) and the second is based on the entirely free OpenStreetMap. Great project! I might get myself a GPS and join in.

Tiles for both demos are rendered with simple Python script using Mapnik's bindings and added as a custom layer to the by now familiar GMap2 interface.

Recently I've been able to focus again on Mapnik, and there should more news very soon. Stay tuned!