Mapnik - The Missing Manual

The Anti-Grain Graphics library used by default for bitmap (PNG, JPEG, …​) output.

The Cairo Graphics library used for vector format output (SVG, PDF, PS) output by default, and also for bitmap output when esplicitly requested.

Compositing provides different ways to combine data to be drawn with already existing from drawing previous layers.

GDAL is a library for processing various raster and vector geospatial data formats released by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The vector format support also runs under the name OGR for historical reasons.

Global Positioning System

GPS exchange format - an XML format to represent GPS data.

Harfbuzz is a Text rendering / shaping library used by Mapnik starting with V3.0

Imposm is a toll to import OpenStreetMap data into a PostGIS database. (See also: Osm2pgsql)

A web frontend and render backend to generate printable map posters and booklets using Mapnik, Python and Cairo Graphics

Defines how opaque or transparent a feature should be. Values range from 0.0 for total transparency to 1.0 for total opacity.

The vector format related part of GDAL.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation

Osm2pgsql is a tool to import OpenStreetMap data into a PostGIS database. It is part of the tool chain used to generated the map tiles provided on openstreetmap.org. (see also: Imposm)

Protocol Buffer Format - a file format for OSM data based on the Google ProtoBuf library. PBF is a binary format not suitable for human readning, but very compact, with file sizes typically only almost half of bzip2 compressed OSM XML.

A symbolizer describes how features appear on rendered maps.

SVG transformations allow to translate, scale, rotate or skew a shape, either by combining one or more individual operations, or by giving them as a transformation matrix right away.