Viewer is a GUI tool for using Mapnik. It's available under demo/viewer and needs to be compiled.

Benefits

  1. View tile images on-the-fly
  2. Debug information on bad config files, points to the erroneous line
  3. Shows scale and envelope for current view
  4. Fast!

Requirements

  • Qt4 including dev files
  • Qmake

Compiling

  1. Modify viewer.pro to match your system (include, lib directories) (FIXME?)
  2. Modify main.cpp to have correct paths to Mapnik's plug-ins and fonts directories (FIXME?)
  3. Qmake
  4. Make

Usage

You could try loading your XML files: 

# ./viewer your.xml

or 

# ./viewer your.xml -1,50,1,52

or 

# ./viewer # (open your.xml from file menu)

Further Reading

Related mailing list discussions: