[OSM-talk] Tile Drawer now plays nicely with TileMill

[Michal Migurski]

Hi,

I've been quietly updating Tile Drawer (http://tiledrawer.com) over the past month, and I've introduced a few new ways that it can interact with TileMill (http://mapbox.com/tilemill).

TileMill works especially well with shapefile data, so I've added a final step in the Tile Drawer setup process that generates fresh shapefiles of your selected area. You can use Tile Drawer as a data pre-processor for use with TileMill, essentially ignoring its rendering functionality and shutting down the virtual machine after it's finished cranking out a selection of zipped shapefiles in /usr/local/tiledrawer/progress. Oliver Tonnhofer's Imposm creates data especially well-suited for use in Tilemill, so I've made sure to include it in the process.

In the other direction, you can now use your TileMill styles in Tile Drawer directly, as long as you stick to a specific shapefile naming scheme and provide a zipped copy of your Mapnik 2.0 XML stylesheet to the startup script. I've made four selected cities available in the correct shapefile naming scheme available here:

	http://stuff.tiledrawer.com/sample-data-san-francisco.zip
	http://stuff.tiledrawer.com/sample-data-london.zip
	http://stuff.tiledrawer.com/sample-data-berlin.zip
	http://stuff.tiledrawer.com/sample-data-tokyo.zip

I'm just putting finishing touches on all of this so documentation remains skimpy, but there's more info on my blog here:

	http://mike.teczno.com/notes/tile-drawer-tilemill.html

-mike.

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michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
                 415.558.1610