February archive

Custom maps with Mapnik (part 2)

February 22, 2008

The people behind OSM Cycle Map have recently added contours. Combining contours with street level data is no trivial task, but Andy and Dave yet again have come up with an attractive solution. If you're a cyclist you know how important it is to see if you're going to be heading up or downhill!

There are some very nice examples on their site, do check them out.

I was looking for places I cycled in the past and here is my favourite for today:

It hasn't been mapped by OSM yet, but there is a lovely cycle route you might try. Starting from the mainland (Glenelg), cross by the small car ferry to Skye. Head straight up the valley in front of you - where you might feel those contours in your legs - and on over the hills till you hit the A87. There are great views on the way (weather permitting). Turn right and back to the mainland (Kyle of Lochalsh) over the (ex)Toll bridge.

Mapnik goes Unicode (properly)

February 20, 2008

Well, we had "Unicode" for a while in Mapnik - first it was ad-hoc utf8 and latin1 to UCS-2/4 transcoders, then iconv and fribidi. It kind of worked (sometimes) but it wasn't a proper solution. There were a few problems with the previous approaches - std::wstring is not portable, fribidi was choking in multi-threaded rendering and had to be disabled.

Result? It was constantly brought to my attention by Morocco in OSM and others. Arabic is a "right-to-left" language for starters and it also requires "shaping" (this is when characters change depending on where they are in the text to form smooth connections between letters).

So here is the solution - ICU. I hope it will be final :).

Custom maps with Mapnik

February 19, 2008

For those of you who don't follow Django - there is a great new project out there - EveryBlock. Adrian Holovaty and the team have been busy putting local information on the web, giving people chance to check everything from restaurants violating the NY trans fats ban to lost property. It is very nicely put together and it's Django of course.

There is an interview with Adrian where he talks, amongst other things, about the technology behind the scenes, which includes Mapnik. Also, the developer in charge of maps Paul Smith describes the reasoning behind their decision not to go with the usual suspects - Google, Yahoo!, or Microsoft.

It is really great to see Mapnik being used to create highly customized, beautiful cartography!

Mapnik 0.5.0 Debian packages

February 16, 2008

debian "..Just wanted to let people know that packages of Mapnik 0.5.0 should have hit the mirrors by now, in unstable, for the use of anyone using this fine distribution."
Great work! Thanks Dominic

Have fun!
Artem

UPDATE : mapnik (0.5.0-1)

Release 0.5.0

February 7, 2008

I'm very pleased to announce Mapnik 0.5.0. It has been a long time in development, but I hope it was worth waiting for. This release brings numerous stability and performance improvements. I am particularly excited to see Mapnik performing well in multi-threaded setups, offering scalability.

During 2007, Mapnik has been deployed in a number of diverse environments, rendering maps 24/7. Here are some people who use Mapnik :

List of some new/improved features:

  • support for native builds on Mac OS X (both Tiger and Leopard)
  • support for single/multi-threading variants
  • gdal raster support
  • more comprehensive text label placement functionality (min_distance, spacing)
  • viewer - qt4 based application
  • character encoding support (iconv)
  • changed internal geometry representation to explicitly support multi-geometries
  • placement_finder is re-factored
  • optional libxml2 based map loader (internal and external entities)
  • image quantization
  • support for image 'views'
  • improved 'memory file' based i/o in shape input plug-in
  • support for 'numeric' type in postgis input plug-in
  • saving images directly into Python string
  • win32 binaries built with VC++ express

***This is a major feature enhancement as well as a bugfix release and everyone is encouraged to upgrade***

Thanks to everyone involved, I really appreciate your help. And let's make Mapnik even better this year!

Artem

Latest win32 binaries (r638)

February 5, 2008

Here are the latest win32 binaries (r638) including bindings for Python 2.5. They will be in the 0.5.0 release, which is imminent. So, give it a try and report any problems. Have fun!