Hi Tereza,
In these days I'm thinking to substitute the GRASS d.* modules with mapnik [0].
Mapnik is the state of the art for high quality rendering of maps,
support several types of export formats and It is widely used.
The advantages to adopt Mapnik are:
- High quality output, symbols [1], text [2], legend[3] etc are
already implemented;
- we will have less code to maintain because part of the job will be
done by another library;
- export into different formats, export as tiles for example should
make easier to integrate an interactive viewer to a ipython notebook
[4,5,6], or with other local and remote services;
- should be quite easy integrate the mapnik layers and rules with a
GUI, we only need to generate an XML and call mapnik to generate the
figure.
The disadvantages are:
- at the moment there is not a direct interface between mapnik and
grass, it is possible to access to the grass maps through the gdal/ogr
interface but it is not working for GRASS7 sofar but may be would be
possible to add a GRASS plugin to mapnik [7].
- we add a new dependence to GRASS and may be will be more difficult
to install GRASS on Windows/Mac platforms and it will increase the
size of the final installation (~43 Mb).
What do you think?
Best regards.
Pietro
[0] http://mapnik.org/
[1] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/PointSymbolizer
[2] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/TextSymbolizer
[3] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/Legending
[4] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook.html
[5] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2012-November/060768.html
[6] https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/1921
[7] https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/PluginArchitecture
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Tereza Fiedlerová
<tfiedlerova@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I'm Tereza Fiedlerová, student of CTU in Prague, Czech Republic. I'd like to
apply for Google Summer of Code 2013. I was looking on Grass SoC Ideas 2013
and I am interested in Symbology/Cartography [1] ideas there. I've read a
little bit about some d. Grass modules, especially about d.legend,
d.vect.thematic, d.area.thematic and something about cairo driver.
In my project, I would like to write new module for creating legend for
vector map (something similar as d.legend for raster map). The other part of
project could be new module for thematic
maps (something like d.vect.thematic and d.area.thematic, but more complex).
For a nice and correct graphical output I could do some improvements in
cairo driver. The target is not to need ps.map module, when user want to do
some graphical output.
I'd like to hear some comments on this topic and maybe also some other
ideas.
Thank You,
Tereza Fiedlerová
Faculty of Civil Engineering
CTU in Prague
[1]
http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_SoC_Ideas_2013#Symbology_.2F_Cartography
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