On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 11:18:48AM +0300, Ari Jolma wrote: > I'm still very much interested in this. Cairo would provide a single API > to render to an image buffer, on PDF and others. It has good support for > rendering text with various fonts and there are high-level language APIs. > > Currently Cairo can be used in Geoinformatica to render geodata, > legends, etc. on a map. I'm already using that a bit and will use it > much more in the future.
I think that for the task you've described, looking into Mapnik might be a good idea. > What I think is needed first, and would be the core content of the > library is 1) a mapping of style information into Cairo commands, 2) > capability to render cartographic symbols on maps, and 3) a mechanism to > allow plugins that add legends etc. on the map, 4) symbol and label > placement algorithms. Second need would perhaps be support for various > geovisualization methods. 1), 2), and 4) already exist in Mapnik. 3) seems to me like it can either be added to Mapnik, or added via post-processing, without needing to reimplement 1), 2) or 4). > Cairo is of course just one technology and not suited for all needs in > this domain. Furthermore, the data provider can be made separate from > the library, but I'd like to start with and use GDAL (OGR in fact) as > the default. Mapnik has support for PostGIS and Shapefiles, but has a plugin-based architecture for reading data, so I would not be surprised to find that an OGR plugin for data access would be too difficult for someone experienced in C++/C. > Anyway, I'd like to finally get going with this and start drafting an > API. Any ideas how to proceed? Set up a svn repository somewhere? I'd strongly recommend starting by looking at existing solutions. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
