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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
