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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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

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