Hi, I'm new to Mapnik and have finally gotten in compiled under Visual Studio (2005). I tried to get the latest svn release compiled but it looks like there are still several issues prohibiting that. The devs are probably in the midst of changes, notably the changeover from iconv to the Unicode library. The current win32 binaries available don't work because of the missing DLL export declaration for the symbolizer_with_image class. I see there's a trak entry for it but it's still missing in the latest svn trunk.
Anyway, Mapnik looks to be a great resource and exactly what I'm looking for although the lack of documentation makes it use rather daunting. Even some basic intro info explaining the data model would be of great use. An explanation of the general flow of how data is added and finally rendered along with descriptions of the function parameters for the most common functions would be great. Other then the demo program there's nothing explaining how anything works. It looks like doxygen comments were started in map.hpp but even those are lacking. For instance the zoom functions mention a bounding box but there's no explanation of what units the parameters should be in. Are they in data coordinates, pixels, etc? One needs to look at the demo program in order to guess at that. I was hoping to get some clarification on how the input plugins work. They are compiled as separate libraries (which I'm doing now), but I don't see them linked in the demo program. I'm specifically interested in using GDAL - and it looks like the GDAL plugin only works with raster formats. No GDAL/OGR for vector formats yet? Is it the parameter "type" field that determines the proper input plugin to be called? Is there any input handled natively by Mapnik or strictly through plugins? (it looks like without the plugins no input formats are supported). I'm ultimately interested in making PDF output. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get the experimental_pdf branch working but in the end it was way too frustrating to get the dependencies all working properly. Now I see there's a cairo_renderer in the latest trunk - is this to be a core part of mapnik in the next release? Thanks for any answers anyone can provide! Like I said it looks like Mapnik has some very useful functionality but it's just a matter of decoding it's capabilities! matt
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