I’m looking for recommendation for (a) professional solution(s) for printing large-scale high-quality topographic map (e.g., topographic map for hiking like this one or large-scale city map like that one). I want to define my own style and be able to print large scale (let’s say 1:10000) paper maps on large formats (let’s say A0-A1). I’m not looking for making map tiles for web-based slippy maps. My source of data would be primarily OpenStreetMap, from which I would use either geofabrik shp or layers from a postgreSQL database using imposm/osm2pgsql. The others capabilities I’m looking for:
- can fill polygon with textural pattern instead of single color pattern
- can make labelling that follows the shape of the elements, such as curved labels along a curved river or a curved street.
- can include contour drawing (of elevation).
- output in vector format.
- can make it programmatically in order to be repeatable for many places.
From what I know, here are some options:
- Mapnik: currently the best solution I have.
- QGIS: But does it (well) support the printing of large maps? I’m also afraid that this would be poorly programmable. Yes I'm aware of this post, but actually I know QGIS well and I know it is not an easy solution for producing large-scale topographic map programmatically unless there is a QGIS plugin or a framework based on QGIS dedicated for that.
- Mapserver: Following this tutorial, I could basically achieve what I want. But it remains a hard work to style the map-file. https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/wiki/Rendering-OSM-data-on-Ubuntu-12.04
But are there some other options? Any feedbacks on this topic?
