[Gdal-dev] how gdal_rasterize works

[Christopher Barker]

Luke Roth wrote:
> what I'd really like to do is to rasterize 
> individual polygons from my C code without having to run 
> gdal_rasterize.exe for each individual feature. 

Drawing a raster image from Vector data can be a very complex process. 
In particular, shape files specify the shapes, but don't specify 
anything about how they should be rendered. Once you know how they 
should be rendered, rendering them well requires a good rendering library.

There are a lot of tools for rendering maps out there (most using 
GDAL!). It's probably better to use one of them. One that does a 
particularly impressive job is Mapnik:

http://mapnik.org/

There are lots of others. You could also just draw the stuff yourself, 
using the GD lib, or Agg, or .....

I'll bet the MapServer project and/or the Python Cartographic library 
has something.

-Chris





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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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