[maemo-developers] Maemo-mapper vector data backend follow-up

[From: Simon Budig]

Simon Pickering (S.G.Pickering at bath.ac.uk) wrote:
> Tile rendering
> ==============
> 
> There's a list of OSM rendering programs here [0].
> 
> Mapnik [1] is the program which renders the map tiles currently downloaded
> by Maemo-mapper. This requires that the OSM MySQL database be processed and
> turned into a PostGIS database. It doesn't look like this is something that
> could be done on-device due to the time and memory requirements.

There also is Osmarender, which is what gets used for the other Layers
used on OSM. It downloads the raw XML data from the OSM-server, uses
XSLT-stylesheets to convert these to SVG and then uses inkscape to
render the SVGs.

I at one point have tried to substitute inkscape with librsvg and wrote
a minimal C-program, which basically worked, although having some weird
memory usage patterns, found and fixed bug #541855 and finally
discovered, that librsvg does not do any text-on-path rendering, which
put an end to my experiments. I am still unclear how I managed to miss
this in the first place...  :)

Anyway, I still believe it to be a feasible approach, so if anyone has
interest in fixing librsvg for text-on-path-rendering - I think the
librsvg-guys would be glad.

Bye,
        Simon

-- 
              simon at budig.de              http://simon.budig.de/
       simon.budig at kernelconcepts.de      http://www.kernelconcepts.de/