For a non-gis person this was a fun read. So thanks for the post!
It’s crazy that a privately held company holds like a third of the market share.
And personally, I don’t think their software is that good. I find their documentation to be undesirable and their solutions to be strict.
Case in point, the geodatabase (gdb) standard is purposefully meant to obfuscate the data within. No one has ever been able to explain to me why this is, and the standard has been open sourced by now.
Not to mention, the number of times I’ve had ArcMap crash without any helpful information as to why it crashed...
That said, ArcMap is the Excel of GIS. It captured market share (especially government contracts) two or three decades ago and no one has disrupted the desktop GIS platform. On the web front, however, I see companies like MapBox far outpacing anything ESRI is capable of yet.
And to anyone looking to learn GIS: Post GIS, GDAL and any scripting language will make you more powerful than most of the people I know within the field.
Funny this article was posted today, because yesterday I was looking into rendering a custom map for a ~100x100 km area from OpenStreetMap data for a particular application. I've got basically no experience making maps but I've dabbled with GDAL and Rasterio. I was thinking of using Mapnik with a dump of (part of) the OpenStreetMap database into a local PostGIS instance. Ideally the rendered tiles should be vector format. Do you think this approach seems reasonable or am I missing a potentially simpler way?
If this is static, Mapnik is a good call. It has some extra anti-aliasing under the hood and it’s exceptionally fast.
And I’m still unclear. Are you trying to serve these tiles to another application? Or are you trying to make a digital/print map?
And SVG is probably excessive for static tiles. It won’t have the size reduction of a raster tile nor the benefit of a true vector solution.
Serve them from local storage to a viewer application.
> And SVG is probably excessive for static tiles. It won’t have the size reduction of a raster tile nor the benefit of a true vector solution.
Ah, is there another vector format for tiles other than SVG? Or are you saying that I should just generate a bunch of compressed rasters?
If this isn’t a huge project, Mapbox is an easy packed solution. Otherwise, there are dozens of really good tile providers already.