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,

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.