[GRASS-dev] GSoC 2015: Mapnik rendering engine for GRASS GIS

[Luca Delucchi]

On 12 March 2015 at 05:38, Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was thinking about this a little bit and I still don't see what would be
> the advantages of Mapnik over other solutions and how used would be the
> result considering that the GUI would be still quite limited. For me it
> seems that if I need some basic outputs, map display with cairo is fine
> especially if we would have some more improvements [1]. If I need advanced
> cartography I have to go to QGIS or something like Mapnik or GMT.
>

But we could integrate Mapnik inside GRASS, it has a lot of feature
for printing beautiful maps

> The idea of using Mapnik as common OSGeo cartographic backend seems dead [2]
> but perhaps QGIS is here to take this place.
>

I'm sorry about that, I like this idea, never heard about that.

> Or do you see this also a something like a missing GUI for Mapnik where one
> could generate just some configuration file which could be later used
> somewhere else with Mapnik?
>

No, my idea was to use Python API to add Mapnik backend to the
Cartographic Composer, Martin proposed to use the C-API to add another
graphical driver.

> Yet another direction is Matplotlib [4] which is anyway a dependency. But
> perhaps this would be just another simple backend which is more advantageous
> when used as part of API. There was actually an attempt co couple GRASS GIS
> with Matplotlib map rendering [5].
>

Yes this could be another direction, I proposed Mapnik because I use
it and I like it.

> Just my thoughts,
> Vaclav
>

-- 
ciao
Luca

http://gis.cri.fmach.it/delucchi/
www.lucadelu.org