[OSM-talk] "Crudely-drawn pint glasses"

[bvh]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 12:51:34PM +0000, Artem Pavlenko wrote:
> This is why I'm making  win32 binaries ( and planning os x pkg) - for  
> ordinary mortals.
> For more advanced folk : sudo apt-get install mapnik  or rpm -ivh  etc.
> All is needed is a bit of extra help (hint hint hint) , I'm  
> personally quite happy with building from source - worksforme :)
...
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by instance. Postgresql ?  
> Mapnik is c++ library that can be used with any modern GUI toolkit to  
> render maps. There are different ways to setup it up, of course and  
> web based service is one of them.

As you said : mapnik is c++ library hence useless for ordinary
mortals. To unlock the power of mapnik they need a setup that
feeds mapnik map data, a front to easily edit their mapstyle
and a backend that let's them chop and save tiles/maps/jpegs
whatever. And that is not (yet) within reach of ordinary mortals,
is it?

But the more I think of it, merkaartor has quite a bit of that
already : it has the data and the tools to easily download them
from OSM api. It recently acquired a mapstyle editor (albeit
quite basic for now). It has a user interface for finding your
area of interest.

What we are missing is the interface towards mapnik
but given both are c++ projects I don't see huge problems...

I'll investigate some more this weekend.

cu bart