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 :

• OpenStreetMapOSM Cycle Map
• EveryBlock
• Космоснимки
• MySociety - travel maps
• 10East
• Placebase
• Heritage Walks

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