The Mapnik Viewer is a GUI tool for rendering and viewing maps based on Mapnik XML mapfiles.
It's available in the demo/viewer folder of your mapnik source code. It is not compiled by default, but can be built separately after installing Mapnik.
Requirements
- A working Mapnik installation
- A Mapnik XML file to view
- Qt4 including dev files (for example, see Qt/Mac Open Source Edition)
- Qmake
Building
NOTE: these instructions assume you are using Mapnik >= 2.1. Mapnik 2.1 source code includes a viewer.pro file that will leverage the mapnik-config to get the proper build settings from your Mapnik install.
Run Qmake to generate a makefile:
cd ./demo/viewer
qmake -makefile
On Mac OSX the above command may generate an XCode project. To generate a normal Makefile do:
qmake -spec macx-g++
Finally, run Make to build the viewer.app or viewer.exe
make
On OS X, if a viewer.xcodeproj was built then open the project in Apple's XCode environment and hit "build and run"
Usage
Double click on the resulting application (viewer.app on Mac OS)
- You can then load map files from the file menu (make sure you have absolute paths set to datasources).
- Hit the Home button to zoom to the data extent.
- The rest should be obvious.
You can also load your XML files when launching the viewer from a terminal:
# On linux this would look like:
./viewer /path/to/your.xml
# On mac this would look like:
./viewer.app/Contents/MacOS/viewer /path/to/your.xml
# or
open -a viewer
or
# ./viewer your.xml -1,50,1,52
Register plugins directory
Plugin directory is default to /usr/local/lib/mapnik/input/
To override it: create a viewer.ini file for example:
[mapnik]
plugins_dir=/usr/lib/mapnik/3.0/input/