Mapnik

Mapnik powers most of the web maps you encounter day to day. Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. Above all Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It is easily extensible and suitable for both desktop and web development.

##Why upgrade to version 2.0 (over 0.7.x):

• Usable advanced labeling (auto label basic, fallback placements) Examples
• [Advanced, nested text styles] (http://mapnik.org/news/2011/09/02/text_formating/)
• Carto 2.0 with Less.js and RegEx awesomeness
• Use per-feature attributes from table for CSS values instead of absolute values.
• Postgis 2.0 support
• New MarkersSymbolizer - allowing you to draw circles of arbitrary size
• [On-the-fly Raster reprojection] (http://mapnik.org/news/2011/09/16/new_raster_reprojection)
• Massively faster rendering during reprojection (e.g. from wgs84 to spherical mercator) under high load/threaded server
• XInclude support in Stylesheets
• More robust clipping of map extents to support more fancy projections
• Global alignment option for polygon pattern fills
• Added support for drawing only first matching rule using filter-mode="first" in Style Support tix
• Codebase is optimized
• Looks like it required Boost and Nodey-bits
• Random changes to styling syntax
• Looks like there is a branch of Cascadenik that works with Mapnik2? This is the feature that would allow Cascadenik to work better in the future, radically reducing the about of filter combinations needed.

Version 2.1 (coming soon):

• Much better support for labeling multigeometries (specifically for natural earth data)
• Massively faster rendering at high zooms using better geometry clipping
• Polygon and line smoothing
• New CSV direct read plugin
• Less memory usage with heavy data like OSM
• Infinite zooming support (you previously could not zoom past z18-19 without problems if your data had polygons)

Question:

What about 2x and "resolution independent" rendering? For 144 dpi etc images using the line weights in the CSS instead of needing to change them?