On 17-03-12 20:55, Brylie Oxley wrote:

Thank you for suggesting Mapnik Stefan! :-) Inkscape would be a suitable GUI for a Mapnik based cartography solution. I do not think that Inkscape and Mapnik are necessarily in opposition, do you?

The major problem is, if you look at cartography to SVG is that data is not offered in layers you would actually use in regular print. The output of mapnik is actually a set of drawing commands. So your audience might require two approaches;

- ability to get an arbitary piece of a map, and the ability to interactively edit the stylesheet, see output etc. Inkscape could help here because stylesheets contain a lot of SVG elements you want to edit along the map; the result of this operation is a stylesheet, and a set of icons.

- the ability to get arbitrary data in layers and be your own renderer, stack layers, assign decimation, add colours etc. this would be closer to having a shapefile in a solution like Illustrator and modifying it. Opposed to mapnik this step requires the editor to do 'layer' operations theirselves.

Stefan