Latest entries

Release 0.5.1

Hello all, I'm pleased to announce 0.5.1 release.

This is a minor bugfix release; it is a recommended upgrade for users of 0.5.0. This release includes the following changes:

  • builds with GCC 4.3
  • re-enables regex support, which was inadvertently disabled in 0.5.0
  • add better error handling to shapeindex
  • support ppc64 builds
  • fix division by zero error in placement_finder.cpp with multiple loops

Big thanks to Dominic Hargreaves for making it happen!

Posted by Artem Pavlenko on April 15, 2008 | 3 comments

Mapnik consulting

Mapnik Consulting

Hello all!
I would like to introduce Mapnik Consulting. I have been consulting for a few years now, but I think the time has come to move things up a gear. Have a look, it even has 'rounded' corners:).

While Mapnik itself plays a central role, my consultancy goes beyond just rendering maps. We offer a wide range of geospatial services.

This in no way means that Mapnik will be overlooked, if anything I'm hoping to increase the pace of development!

Cheers!

Posted by Artem Pavlenko on March 11, 2008 | 0 comments

Custom maps with Mapnik (part 2)

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.

Posted by Artem Pavlenko on February 22, 2008 | 0 comments

Mapnik goes Unicode (properly)

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 :).

Posted by Artem Pavlenko on February 20, 2008 | 2 comments

Custom maps with Mapnik

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!

Posted by Artem Pavlenko on February 19, 2008 | 0 comments

Mapnik 0.5.0 Debian packages

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)

Posted by Artem Pavlenko on February 16, 2008 | 1 comment

Release 0.5.0

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

Posted by Artem Pavlenko on February 7, 2008 | 8 comments

Latest win32 binaries (r638)

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!

Posted by artem on February 5, 2008 | 467 comments

Managing large XML files

As a new Mapnik release 0.5.0 is not far away, it is a good time to present some very nifty new features. There are quite a few of them and each one deserves a news item, but today I'd like to introduce Managing large XML files in Mapnik - a long-awaited feature which brings sanity (parameterization,re-usability,readability) into the domain of managing complex maps aka OSM. While I mention OSM as an example, the same techniques can be applied to any map.

Last year, shortly after Mapnik was deployed to render tiles for OpenStreetMap and users started adding new styles to the osm.xml file, it become apparent that editing map definition is not a trivial task. I saw this problem coming but at the time I didn't have a good solution. I just blamed XML for being designed for machines and not humans, which is true of course, but... Well, it turned out that some lesser known (advanced) XML features can be used to greatly improve the situation. Thanks to David Siegel, for implementing support for libxml2 parser in Mapnik and also for writing HOWTO which is a great starting point.

P.S. I just modified my local osm.xml to use external entities for things like database connection parameters and I really like it!

Happy New Year!

Posted by artem on January 2, 2008 | 42 comments

FOSS4G 2007

I'm going to be at FOSS4G2007 later this month.

The plan is to get to Victoria, BC on Sunday 23rd and join Nick Black and others for a Victoria mapping party

No presentations this time, phew. But I'll be demoing Mapnik on 25th at 14:40. I'll see you there!

Posted by artem on September 10, 2007 | 3 comments

Society of Cartographers - 43rd Annual Summer School

The 43rd Annual Summer School of the Society of Cartographers has started in Portsmouth, UK . I'll be there on 5-6 September, talking about Mapnik on 6th. Join in if you're around.

Also, now that my old computer has died I purchased a Mac Mini and I'm hoping to resume win32 stuff soon.

Cheers

Posted by artem on September 4, 2007 | 0 comments

State of the Map

Join me in Manchester, UK on 14-15 of July for the State of the Map. I'll be talking about Mapnik, Openstreetmap and more. It is promising to be the conference of the year and if you're not signed yet, hurry up!

Other news: there is a new site Kosmosnimki which has a slick JavaScript interface, a full map of Russia (rendered with Mapnik) and there are high resolution photographs of the Moscow region. They're planning to have full satellite coverage in the future. Looks really cool, check it out!

Posted by Artem on June 21, 2007 | 0 comments

Mapnik win32 binaries

Yesterday, I built and packaged win32 binaries for Mapnik. All libraries including dependencies are built with VC++ Express on Vista.

There is no installer (yet) so you have to setup %PATH% etc yourself. In 'bin' directory (e.g c:\\mapnik\\bin ) there is a small demo application 'rundemo.exe' which produces two map images from demo data. You can run it like this: 

rundemo.exe c:\mapnik\lib\mapnik\input

Everyone (with Windows box) is encouraged to give it a try and report any problems, gotchas ... If everything is OK then win32 binaries will be available as a part of Mapnik release, starting from 0.4.1.

Cheers,
Artem

Posted by Artem on April 27, 2007 | 10 comments

Debian packages

debian Dominic Hargreaves just updated Mapnik Debian packages to the latest version 0.4.0.
Great news! Installing mapnik was never so easy: 

	sudo apt-get install python-mapnik
Have fun!

Posted by Artem on March 12, 2007 | 0 comments

New Release 0.4.0

Dear all,
Mapnik 0.4.0 is out!
This is a major feature enhancement as well as a bug fix release. The new features include :

  • Projection transformations
  • Multiple named styles in WMS
  • 'Line following' text labels
  • 'Shield' symbolizer
  • Feature querying
  • Character encodings support
  • GetFeatureInfo with text/plain and text/xml output
  • Support for right to left languages

Thank you to: Jean-Francois Doyon, Vince Spader, Vincent Schut, Toby Collet, David Leaver, Ehud Shabtai, Christopher Schmidt, Jon Burgess, John Hague and everybody else involved for helping to make Mapnik a great project!

Also big thanks to GeospatialVision for supporting mapnik development and 10East.com for sponsoring hosting.

Enjoy!
Artem

Posted by artemp on February 26, 2007 | 0 comments