Technical Ramblings

Today, I finally made the switch from the 7 month-running Mapnik based homepage map on the boston freemap to a MapServer 5.0-based AGG rendering.

The new map has had more cartography put into than any existing Boston Freemap to date. Maps like:

Cambridgeport
The state of Massachusetts
Downtown Boston

All demonstrate some of the qualities offered by the new MapServer.

Among other things, the new maps:

• Have had the labels lowercased, to fit more text in (Python OGR script I wrote, help from #gdal)
• Have had sortshp run over them, to order them so that you don’t get weird overlaps (help from danmo)
• Have had additional cartography work done in order to create a better fit for labels
• Benefit from the excellent AGG rendering work I’ve been describing here, by tbonfort.

In my opinion, the look and feel of these maps really does approach the level of quality that the commercial services have set, as far as rendering goes. MapServer’s leaps and bounds in the past couple weeks in rendering have changed the game from being a “Work on the rendering” game back to a “Work on the cartography” game.

I want to send a special thanks to tbonfort and all the work he’s done recently to make this happen! The rendering is simply incredible in comparison — truly night and day. I’m so happy to be back in MapServer land where the hard work I’ve done on this cartography hasn’t gone to waste. He and the other MapServer developers have really brought me back into the fold with the latest work, and I’m happy to be there.

The font work really doesn’t show up well in a small screenshot — it’s a total affect that makes a difference. Comparing AGG to GD is probably pretty informative though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 11:55 am and is filed under Locality and Space, Mapserver, OpenLayers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.