It's my great pleasure to announce Mapnik 0.7.0! This is an exciting release [1]. Nearly 80 tickets closed. Over 300 changesets. 22 new features or enhancements, and nearly 50 bug fixes addressing key things as png256 image quality, postgres behavior, and builds on the latest linux flavors.
Downloads at http://mapnik.org/. Not to miss are the freshly built easy installers for Mac OSX available at http://dbsgeo.com and brand new windows binaries that support Python 26. The single most exciting new feature in my mind is the new, beta support for reading huge rasters using overviews with the GDAL plugin. Thanks to Jon Burgess, Lucio, Alberto, and Craig for pushing this feature forward. This opens an important door to fast access to formats such as MrSID. Hardcore PostGIS plugin users are likely already enjoying the benefits of a slew of improved behaviors and options. If you are not aware of them see the release changelog [2] for details until I can write more formal docs. Cheers go to Robert Coup for teaching me the ropes and Mike Migurski for pushing the envelope and helping me understand the yak. Certainly the sleeper gems in this release are a set of meticulous and sophisticated improvements to labeling and shields, based on work from David [3] and Jochen [4]. Amazing stuff really, I'm still piecing through the goodness trying to understand it all. These improvements in the wild are going to mean even more gorgeous maps appearing in coming months. Cartography purists (like me) may enjoy flipping the switch on a tiny new attribute of the Polygon Symbolizer called 'gamma'. At mid-ranges (.5) it allows slight dilation of polygons which makes for a perfectly seamless shared edge between polygons. This approach is crisper, and faster to render than the workaround of painting a thin outline on polygons with an extra LineSymbolizer. See a simple example here [5]. As a last note I'd like to personally thank Lennard and Colin on #mapnik IRC (and of OSM fame) for encouragement and good ideas. They are not the only inspiring voices on IRC, but they stand out. Their amazing work as cartographers helps reinforce that Mapnik, despite already being an amazing tool for cartography, can still be better, in fact way better. And finally, thanks to Artem for countless items but most of all working tirelessly to fix dozens difficult bugs in the push to release while actively working on Mapnik2 and mentoring new contributers. Thanks everyone! Dane [1] http://mapnik.org/news/2010/jan/19/release_0_7_0/ [2] http://trac.mapnik.org/browser/tags/release-0.7.0/CHANGELOG [3] http://trac.mapnik.org/changeset/1341 [4] http://trac.mapnik.org/changeset/1254 [5] http://trac.mapnik.org/wiki/PolygonSymbolizer _______________________________________________ Mapnik-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-users
