[OSM-talk] OSM map renderer - update

[nick at hogweed.org]

Progress report on renderer (nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/index.php)... my last 
for a few days:

-It now looks passable at street level. I have done this by grabbing a 
progressively bigger area of data relative to the tile size as you zoom in. 
This seems to be the fastest way of dealing with the 'segments crossing the 
tile' problem for the moment.

-As I indicated yesterday ImageMagick seems to be the way to go for 
antialiasing etc. The most regularly maintained ImageMagick API appears to be 
the newer "MagickWand" API, however the installation instructions imply 
recompiling the whole of PHP. I've emailed the author of the "MagickWand" PHP 
bindings to see if this is strictly necessary.

There's the possibility of converting the whole thing to Ruby and using the 
ruby-magick API (would give me an excuse to learn Ruby properly anyhow...) 
but my main concern here would be converting the contour-generation code... 
this would be quite a big job :-)

Nick