world freemap agg/gd view

[John Smith]

not flame but couldn't resist coz below doesn't sound right

http://www.mapnik.org/faq/
Why mapnik? Why bother, we have Mapserver already?
Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It uses the AGG library and
offers world class anti-aliasing rendering with subpixel accuracy for
geographic data. It is written from scratch in modern C++ and doesn't
suffer from design decisions made a decade ago. When it comes to
handling common software tasks such as memory management, filesystem
access, regular expressions, parsing and so on, Mapnik doesn't
re-invent the wheel, but utilises best of breed industry standard
libraries from boost.org

in modern C++ and doesn't suffer from design decisions made a decade
ago. When it
: meaning not time-tested??

a case of style over substance??

want to stick with it
jzs

On 8/3/07, Dave McIlhagga <dmcilhagga at dmsolutions.ca> wrote:
> No developer here :) but .. to add to Chris' comments.
>
> AGG was added for one of our customers -- and to be frank it was
> mostly driven by the Google bar. There is still lots to go -- and
> we're already working on the business drivers to take next steps to
> make things that much better.
>
> I'm pretty certain 5.2 and beyond will show some more big leaps in
> map quality -- so stick with it, lots more good stuff to come!
>
> Dave
>
> On 3-Aug-07, at 5:05 PM, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 03:54:16PM -0500, Jeff Hoffmann wrote:
> >> Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> >>
> >>> LayerSelector (on the upper right) allows you to select between
> >>> agg and
> >>> gd. Default is GD -- the agg is certainly... brighter. And not
> >>> quite the
> >>> look I was looking for.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Is there
> >> a "big picture" of what AGG will be used to do eventually (or at
> >> least
> >> some ideas) or was it all pretty much to get a little bit better
> >> anti-aliased output?
> >
> > I have no clue what AGG was added for, but the difference between
> > GD and
> > AGG is what made me switch away from MapServer 8 months ago, and as
> > time
> > goes on, I find that more and more of users that I work with say
> > "Well,
> > why doesn't it look as good as Google Maps?"
> >
> > Without the font changes, I'm not quite back to the point where I want
> > to switch from Mapnik back to MapServer yet, but I don't think that
> > anyone can say that:
> >
> > http://boston.freemap.in/kamap.html?
> > lat=901231.7146&lon=232335.42917&zoom=8&layers=B
> >
> > vs.
> >
> > http://boston.freemap.in/?
> > lat=901231.7146&lon=232335.42917&zoom=8&layers=B
> >
> > doesn't demonstrate a fairly significant difference in rendering.
> > It was
> > certainly enough for me to make the switch from MapServer to Mapnik.
> >
> > I'll let actual MapServer developers answer the question though, as
> > I'm
> > not one.
> >
> > Regards,
> > --
> > Christopher Schmidt
> > MetaCarta