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> And to anyone looking to learn GIS: Post GIS, GDAL and any scripting language will make you more powerful than most of the people I know within the field. Fu

> And to anyone looking to learn GIS: Post GIS, GDAL and any scripting language will make you more powerful than most of the people I know within the field. Funny this article was posted today, because yesterday I was looking into rendering a custom map for a ~100x100 km area from OpenStreetMap data for a particular application. I've got basically no experience making maps but I've dabbled with GDAL and Rasterio. I was thinking of using Mapnik with a dump of (part of) the OpenStreetMap database into a local PostGIS instance. Ideally the rendered tiles should be vector format. Do you think this approach seems reasonable or am I missing a potentially simpler way?

bransonf 7y ago
Are you trying to render a static map or make something interactive? If this is static, Mapnik is a good call. It has some extra anti-aliasing under the hood and it’s exceptionally fast.
- sleavey 7y ago
  Static; thanks for the info. I would ideally like to dump a bunch of SVG tiles for various zoom levels so I can store them in a static directory on my server rather than serve them dynamically. I take it that Mapnik is capable of dumps like this? And, I would like to use the Python bindings but they look relatively badly documented. Would you suggest a newbie like me uses the C or XML interfaces instead, if they are better documented?
  - bransonf 7y ago
    I’ve only used the Python library, and I think I survived. I only used it for some visualization however. And I’m still unclear. Are you trying to serve these tiles to another application? Or are you trying to make a digital/print map? And SVG is probably excessive for static tiles. It won’t have the size reduction of a raster tile nor the benefit of a true vector solution.
    - sleavey 7y ago
      > And I’m still unclear. Are you trying to serve these tiles to another application? Or are you trying to make a digital/print map? Serve them from local storage to a viewer application. > And SVG is probably excessive for static tiles. It won’t have the size reduction of a raster tile nor the benefit of a true vector solution. Ah, is there another vector format for tiles other than SVG? Or are you saying that I should just generate a bunch of compressed rasters?
      - bransonf 7y ago
        Ah, I haven’t really got into that territory with mapnik. But to the second point, yes you should just generate a bunch of Raster tiles. And before doing this, ask yourself if you really need to. If this isn’t a huge project, Mapbox is an easy packed solution. Otherwise, there are dozens of really good tile providers already.
michal_f 7y ago
https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker generates mapbox vector tiles from OSM, which you can serve static. I saved an example config and usage to help get going https://github.com/ogre/tilemaker_config https://github.com/ogre/tilemaker_config

bransonf 7y ago

Are you trying to render a static map or make something interactive? If this is static, Mapnik is a good call. It has some extra anti-aliasing under the hood and it’s exceptionally fast.

sleavey 7y ago
Static; thanks for the info. I would ideally like to dump a bunch of SVG tiles for various zoom levels so I can store them in a static directory on my server rather than serve them dynamically. I take it that Mapnik is capable of dumps like this? And, I would like to use the Python bindings but they look relatively badly documented. Would you suggest a newbie like me uses the C or XML interfaces instead, if they are better documented?
- bransonf 7y ago
  I’ve only used the Python library, and I think I survived. I only used it for some visualization however. And I’m still unclear. Are you trying to serve these tiles to another application? Or are you trying to make a digital/print map? And SVG is probably excessive for static tiles. It won’t have the size reduction of a raster tile nor the benefit of a true vector solution.
  - sleavey 7y ago
    > And I’m still unclear. Are you trying to serve these tiles to another application? Or are you trying to make a digital/print map? Serve them from local storage to a viewer application. > And SVG is probably excessive for static tiles. It won’t have the size reduction of a raster tile nor the benefit of a true vector solution. Ah, is there another vector format for tiles other than SVG? Or are you saying that I should just generate a bunch of compressed rasters?
    - bransonf 7y ago
      Ah, I haven’t really got into that territory with mapnik. But to the second point, yes you should just generate a bunch of Raster tiles. And before doing this, ask yourself if you really need to. If this isn’t a huge project, Mapbox is an easy packed solution. Otherwise, there are dozens of really good tile providers already.

michal_f 7y ago

https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker generates mapbox vector tiles from OSM, which you can serve static. I saved an example config and usage to help get going https://github.com/ogre/tilemaker_config https://github.com/ogre/tilemaker_config