Hi Andrew,
I agree with you on the fact that symbology and styling are of prime
importance to make "pretty" maps. But these variables depends on
cartographer skills, not on software quality. Of course, the
cartographer may meet design constraints or opportunities with a given
software but this aspects concerns features, not rendering quality.
If you design a very nice map, with pertinent symbology, color scheme,
etc, you might be upset if your rendering software make it ugly or
simply not as nice as it could be. I already tried to produce the *same*
map with two different softwares and the results were different. I could
just say "this soft is better, this one is bad" but depending on map
aims, the definition of "good rendering" may differ. This is quite
subjective and that's why I enquire about everyone's interpretation of
what is a "good rendering".
Cheers
Gilles
Andrew Turner wrote:
What are you trying to discover or prove? Just 'perfectness of
rendering'? Not really something that is necessarily pertinent to
cartographic renders. Why not compare them against Illustrator, Ink,
etc? :
If you really want to do cartographic, and their "prettiness" then you
need to include analysis of symbology, colorization (not uniformity,
but choice of color, contrast, etc), and styling of lines. These are
what make ugly maps from pretty maps. I think your original criteria
are probably rather inconsequential once a basic threshold (e.g.
readability) is crossed.
Steve Chilton (Society of Cartographers http://www.soc.org.uk/) is a
good resource to ping on this. There are also some books such as:
Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS
Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users
Principles of Cartographic Design
(http://www.mckinleyville.com/cart/cabinet/cab_cartprinc.html)
anything less will be an invalid and misleading study.
On 10/10/07, Gilles Bassière <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi list,
I'm doing a comparative study of OpenSource cartographic servers
(Mapserver, Geoserver and Mapnik). Beside raw performance and features,
I'd like to assess the rendering quality, say how pretty produced maps
are. Precisely, I'm interested in the quality of the drawing work, my
point is not about symbology, nor styling of maps.
I have some problems to find a set of objective criteria I could
benchmark my servers against. So far, I have already identified the
following:
- sharpness of details
- smoothness of lines
- uniformity of colors
I'm open to any comments. Do you think these criteria are consistent
regarding the purpose of my study? Does anyone have other criteria to
suggest?
Regards
--
Gilles Bassiere
MAKINA CORPUS
30 rue des Jeuneurs
FR-75011 PARIS
http://www.makina-corpus.com
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--
Gilles Bassiere
MAKINA CORPUS
30 rue des Jeuneurs
FR-75011 PARIS
http://www.makina-corpus.com
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