[Carto] Sample Map Rendering Input File

[Jean-Denis Giguere]

Greetings!

I'm just yet another new suscriber of carto... ;-) I'm not a Python
GIS guru, but I have a lot of interest on this side. You will find my
2¢ below.

2010/4/8 Landon Blake <lblake at ksninc.com>:
> It sounds like Python is the winner.

Nice! I think we won't be disappointed by this choice.

I poke Sean Gillies, which may be interested by this project. I'm sure
he could give us very valuable advices.

>
> Carlos: Do you have experience with Python? If you do, can you help with the
> following questions:
>
>
>
> (1)     What is the best Python library to use for parsing XML?

There ara many options, do we need a full featured libraries with
extended functions or a more simple/lightweight library?
Do we want to limit dependencies using built-in functions as much as possible?

>
> (2)     Is there an existing Python library for parsing WKT?

shapely (http://trac.gispython.org/lab/wiki/Shapely ) . It does much
more than reading WKT.

>
> (3)     I believe we can use OGR for reading ESRI Shapefiles. Is this what
> you would recommend?
>

OGR support would be interesting because you get support for many
formats at once.

> (4)     Is there an existing library that can take some sort of vector
> geometries and convert them to rasters? (Something like the Java 2D graphics
> library?)

shapely have some related features. It can be use with matplotlib
which may be (or not) interesting for this project.

>
>
>
> Now that I think about it, using a vector format like EPS or SVG might be
> easier than raster for the first output of the sample rendering engine.

matplotlib supports many output formats, this may be helpful for
prototyping and maybe more.


Best regards,


Jean-Denis