[Maposmatic-dev] Fwd: [Mapnik-users] Mapnik 0.7.0 is released!

[David MENTRE]

Hello,

Latest Mapnik is officially released. I'm using 0.7.0-RC1 on my
development machine without any issue.

Regards,
d.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dane Springmeyer <address@hidden>
Date: 2010/1/22
Subject: [Mapnik-users] Mapnik 0.7.0 is released!
To: Mapnik users mailing-list <address@hidden>


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

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