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 :
- OpenStreetMap OSM 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
Posted by Artem Pavlenko on February 7, 2008



Thank you for all your hard work on this, it is greatly appreciated over here in Toronto.
Appreciative, Thank you very much :)
I'm a little late to the release party, but congratulations, Artem and the Mapnik team, excellent work.
Thanks Paul! Maybe soon we'll deserve a real party :)
Hi Artem. Great work! I understand that the windows binaries were built using MSVC++ express edition (please correct me if I am wrong). Is there a project file for MSVC++ available anywhere (I checked the subversion repository but could not find it) Thanks again for all the hard work, Jim.
Jim, thanks! Yes, I use vc++ express and Boost.Build.v2. It is not in svn, yet. If you're interested in win32 build system I suggest you join mapnik-devel. Cheers, Artem
Hi Artem. Thanks, I have joined mapnik-devel. I found your win32 build files refered to in the October2007 archive of mapnik-devel. I will start from there... Jim.
if someone convert mapnik to java, or write a wrapper function for it -> feel free to contact me.