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 utilizes best of breed industry standard libraries from boost.org

What data formats are supported?

At the time of writing mapnik can read all OGR and GDAL supported vector and raster datasets. Mapnik also has a native ESRI Shapefile, PostGIS and TIFF readers, using a plugin framework. 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?

Which platforms does it run on?

Mapnik is a cross platform toolkit that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux (Since release 0.4). Users commonly run Mapnik on Mac 10.4.x - 10.5.x (intel only at this point), as well as Debian/Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and FreeBSD Linux distributions. If you run Mapnik on another Linux platform please add it to the list on the Trac Wiki

I've heard Mapnik is hard to install, is it?

No.

Mapnik has an easy to use Python build system called Scons. With the release of 0.6.0 checking for Mapnik dependencies has improved greatly and Mapnik can be quite easy to install.

So what can be hard?

Installing Mapnik dependencies, including Boost and ICU is new for many users. To help with this system specific install guides can be found at:

I'm having trouble installing Mapnik dependencies, what should I do?

The dependencies for Mapnik can sometimes be tricky to install, especially the Boost Library. Don't hesitate to ask for help on the mapnik users list or in IRC if you have questions about installing and linking Boost or other dependencies.

Boost binaries are available on windows, and you can install Boost fairly easily using Macports on Mac, but the various package management systems for boost on linux can trip up the Mapnik install scripts. If you are trying to install Mapnik on a linux distribution other than recent versions of Ubuntu, Debian, or FreeBSD, make sure to get in touch on mapnik-users with your experience.

What are the plans for the future?

As always, there are lots of things in the pipeline. Sign up for the mapnik-users list or mapnik-devel list to join the community discussion.

Also, if you are a developer, check out this list of requested enhancements for Mapnik.