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"Toner" is the name of the high contrast, black-and-white map tiles, and Mapnik stylesheets, used for the Dotspotting project.

citytracking.github.com/toner/
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Toner

"Toner" is the name of the B+W (black and white) map tiles, and Mapnik stylesheets, used for the Dotspotting project. Toner was designed by Geraldine Sarmiento.

Examples

https://github.com/Citytracking/toner/tree/master/examples

How to use Toner

At the end of the day Toner generates a stylesheet that can be used by a program called Mapnik to draw maps. Those maps might be a single large image for print or a lot of small images for map tiles but as far as Mapnik is concerned there is an image of a set size that covers a specific geographic area and a bunch of rules (styles) for how to draw the stuff inside those boxes.

Toner relies on a tool called Cascadenik so that map styles can be defined using a CSS-like syntax that is a little more friendly than the XML-based markup language that Mapnik uses by default. With Cascadenik you define two kinds of files: Things ending in '.mss' are where the actual look and feel for a map; Things ending in '.mml' are where you define administrative bits like database passwords and queries for things to show on the map.

This is the place where are the non-database-y things required to generate the "Toner" Mapnik stylesheets are kept.

The style.mml and related .mss files control the look and feel of the Toner cartography. These files are writen in a preprocessor language called Cascadenik. If you make changes to the stylesheets, you will need to convert this to the native XML format that Mapnik supports to render the map tiles.

Use the following command (from inside the 'mapnik' directory):

make style.xml

Which is really just a shortcut for typing this:

cascadenik-compile.py style.mml > style.xml

This will take your 'style.mml' and all the '.mss' files (the things that define the look and feel of the Toner maps) and smush them together to create a new file called 'style.xml'. This new file is what Mapnik uses to render maps.

For example, once you've created your new 'style.xml' file you could use the 'nik2img' program that is included with Mapnik to render a map of the USA like this:

nik2img.py -b -126 24 -66 49 -s 900913 -d 1024 768 \
	--fonts=fonts/Arial.ttf,fonts/Arial\ Bold.ttf,fonts/Arial\ Italic.ttf \
	style.xml usa.png

A sample 'usa.png' rendering is included in the 'examples' directory.

If you wanted to use the TileStache server libraries to draw map tiles using Mapnik, you would create a new layer (in your TileStache config file) like this:

"toner": {
	"provider": {
		"name": "mapnik",
		"mapfile": "/path/to/mapnik/style.xml",
		"fonts": "/path/to/mapnik/fonts"
	},
	"projection": "spherical mercator",
	"metatile": { "rows": 4, "columns": 4 }
}

Take a look in the 'tilestache' directory for more details about using the Toner stylesheets with TileStache.

Make map sandwitches

Dependencies

The short version is: There are a lot.

The long version is: The gritty details of installing some of the tools that Toner uses are outside the scope of this document. We've tried to give you the shape of what you need to do and linked to the available documentation elsewhere.

Software Dependencies (required)

Software Dependencies (optional)

Data Dependencies (required)

Database Tables

The Toner stylesheets need access to a pair of PostGIS databases:

  • A database containing PlanetOSM data (as created by the osm2pgsql script) and coastline using the spherical mercator projection (EPSG:900913). See below for details.

  • A database containing NaturalEarth data, as created by the shp2pgsql script (this is installed with PostGIS), using the spherical mercator projection (EPSG:900913). See below for details.

OpenStreetMap (OSM)

OSM publishes freely available downloads of their entire dataset at http://planet.openstreetmap.org. Instructions for installing and setting up OSM are outside the scope of this document but the OSM site has thorough documentation available at: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/PostGIS

If you don't want to install the entire OSM planet database but want to render tiles for a smaller area you can also use the MirrorOSM tile provider in TileStache to retrieve and store OSM data in PostGIS. Details are available over here:

http://www.tilestache.org/doc/TileStache.Goodies.Providers.MirrorOSM.html

You will also need to add a copy of the OSM coastline to your planet_osm database. The OSM coastline is distributed as a shapefile that you will need to import using the 'shp2pgsql' program:

http://tile.openstreetmap.org/processed_p.tar.bz2

OSM-related

Toner uses a table containing OSM-derived data called 'planet_osm_motorways'. There's a handy PGSQL script called 'motorways.pgsql' in the 'osm' table that you can run (once you've set up your planet_osm tables) to create the new table.

Natural Earth

NaturalEarth is a public domain map dataset of various cultural and vector datasets. It is available for download at: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

Toner uses many, but not all of the datasets in NaturalEarth so the easiest thing is just to grab the shapefiles we use as a single compressed file over here:

http://citytracking.s3.amazonaws.com/toner/toner-naturalearth-1.1-epsg900913.zip

This file contains the 13 NaturalEarth datasets Toner uses as shapefiles projected using EPGS:900913 (sometimes known as "spherical mercator" which really just means "good for making map tiles"). They also correct a known issue with the NaturalEarth shapefiles where polygons crossing the 180° meridian start to behave badly.

You will still need to use the 'shp2pgsql' program to import them in to your PostGIS database.

If you want to install of all NaturalEarth from scratch there are a few things you should be aware of first.

The various datasets are available as separate downloads but here's a simple shell script that will download them all, one at a time:

https://github.com/straup/naturalearth-tools/blob/master/fetchall-vector.sh

NaturalEarth is distributed using the WGS84 map projection so you will need to reproject all the various shapefiles (in to the spherical mercator projection) before importing them in to your database.

Here's another simple shell script that wraps up the entire process of converting the NaturalEarth shapefiles and then importing them in to a PostGIS database. It assumes that you have installed all the dependencies listed above:

https://github.com/straup/naturalearth-tools/blob/master/shp2pgmerc.sh

Included data

https://github.com/citytracking/toner/blob/master/import_included_map_data_to_postgis.sh

We've prepped city labels with Dymo at several zoom levels so you don't have to (it takes weeks). The resulting shapefiles (SHP and related extensions) should be imported into PostGIS for optimal performance and we include a script for that. The MML file assumes this step has been accomplished.

Also included are a dump of beta 1.5 Natural Earth roads for the mid-zooms. The import script pushes those into PostGIS, too.

Other Stuff

https://github.com/straup/postgis-tools

These are mostly just a bunch of vanilla shell scripts that handle the multi-step process of setting up a PostGIS database.

About

"Toner" is the name of the high contrast, black-and-white map tiles, and Mapnik stylesheets, used for the Dotspotting project.

citytracking.github.com/toner/

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