MapnikViewer

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/