[GRASS-dev] GSoC 2013, GRASS symbology idea

[Pietro]

Hi Tereza,

In these days I'm thinking to substitute the GRASS d.* modules with mapnik [0].
Mapnik is the state of the art for high quality rendering of maps,
support several types of export formats and It is widely used.

The advantages to adopt Mapnik are:
- High quality output, symbols [1], text [2], legend[3] etc are
already implemented;
- we will have less code to maintain because part of the job will be
done by another library;
- export into different formats, export as tiles for example should
make easier to integrate an interactive viewer to a ipython notebook
[4,5,6], or with other local and remote services;
- should be quite easy integrate the mapnik layers and rules with a
GUI, we only need to generate an XML and call mapnik to generate the
figure.

The disadvantages are:
- at the moment there is not a direct interface between mapnik and
grass, it is possible to access to the grass maps through the gdal/ogr
interface but it is not working for GRASS7 sofar but may be would be
possible to add a GRASS plugin to mapnik [7].
- we add a new dependence to GRASS and may be will be more difficult
to install GRASS on Windows/Mac platforms and it will increase the
size of  the final installation (~43 Mb).

What do you think?

Best regards.

Pietro

[0] http://mapnik.org/
[1] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/PointSymbolizer
[2] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/TextSymbolizer
[3] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/Legending
[4] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook.html
[5] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2012-November/060768.html
[6] https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/1921
[7] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/PluginArchitecture


On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Tereza Fiedlerová
<tfiedlerova at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm Tereza Fiedlerová, student of CTU in Prague, Czech Republic. I'd like to
> apply for Google Summer of Code 2013. I was looking on Grass SoC Ideas 2013
> and I am interested in Symbology/Cartography [1] ideas there. I've read a
> little bit about some d. Grass modules, especially about d.legend,
> d.vect.thematic, d.area.thematic and something about cairo driver.
>
> In my project, I would like to write new module for creating legend for
> vector map (something similar as d.legend for raster map). The other part of
> project could be new module for thematic
> maps (something like d.vect.thematic and d.area.thematic, but more complex).
> For a nice and correct graphical output I could do some improvements in
> cairo driver. The target is not to need ps.map module, when user want to do
> some graphical output.
>
> I'd like to hear some comments on this topic and maybe also some other
> ideas.
>
> Thank You,
>
> Tereza Fiedlerová
> Faculty of Civil Engineering
> CTU in Prague
>
>
> [1]
> http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_SoC_Ideas_2013#Symbology_.2F_Cartography
>
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