Comment by bransonf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bransonf | Hacker News Reader

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I have the same sentiment on ESRI. It’s basically all I got taught in my university courses, but it’s not what I ever want to use.

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.

> 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?

Are you trying to render a static map or make something interactive?

If this is static, Mapnik is a good call. It has some extra anti-aliasing under the hood and it’s exceptionally fast.

Static; thanks for the info. I would ideally like to dump a bunch of SVG tiles for various zoom levels so I can store them in a static directory on my server rather than serve them dynamically. I take it that Mapnik is capable of dumps like this? And, I would like to use the Python bindings but they look relatively badly documented. Would you suggest a newbie like me uses the C or XML interfaces instead, if they are better documented?

I’ve only used the Python library, and I think I survived. I only used it for some visualization however.

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.

> 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?

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?

Ah, I haven’t really got into that territory with mapnik. But to the second point, yes you should just generate a bunch of Raster tiles. And before doing this, ask yourself if you really need to.

If this isn’t a huge project, Mapbox is an easy packed solution. Otherwise, there are dozens of really good tile providers already.

https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker generates mapbox vector tiles from OSM, which you can serve static. I saved an example config and usage to help get going https://github.com/ogre/tilemaker_config

oblig. mention for others outside of the ESRI sphere of influence that QGIS exists, is still FOSS, and still actively developed https://qgis.org/en/site/

QGIS does an admirable job competing with ArcGIS.

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