Knowing Mapnik

Mapnik is the tool that we will use to produce our maps. It's a very powerful mapping library used by many websites.

In this first topic, we will go through some experiments to get to know Mapnik's features.

Now we will perform a few experiments with Mapnik in order to know how it works. First, let's organize the code for this chapter:

1. Inside your geopy project, copy the Chapter4 folder and rename it to Chapter5.
2. Inside the Chapter5 folder, create a new folder named mapnik_experiments. To do that, right-click in your Chapter5 folder and choose New | Directory.
3. Still in Chapter5, create another folder named output; we will place the maps and images we create into that folder.

Making a map with pure Python

Mapnik has two ways to define a map; one uses pure Python code, the other an XML file.

Mapnik's Python API is very extensive and wraps almost all of the package's functionalities. In the next steps we will experiment with making a map with Python code only...