Rendering

This page discusses rendering aspects of OSM data.

Rendering Methods

The main two options :

Mapnik - Requires Linux, PostgreSQL and various C++ libraries. This is most suitable for high-end server tile generating. Designed to be fast running, but not particularly easy to set up.
Osmarender - XSLTs which do OSM XML to SVG transformation. tiles@home is a project which uses Osmarender to create a tile set for server a map layer alongside Mapnik's, but osmarender can also be a good option for doing one-off renderings. This is (probably) the only way of getting maps in SVG format, which allows you to do post-processing tidy up tweaks.

You can easily see output from these two renderers, available as layers on the map.

Other renderers:

Kosmos is a .NET (windows) application which is lightweight, in that it isn't designed for high performance rendering or huge volumes of data. However it is very flexible, and good option for one-off rendering.
Pyrender - A collection of ideas, and some code in Python for various rendering server steps.
PHP rendering - Renderer in php. Not maintained.
Phprender - updated version of the above?
CartoType - renderer and routing app. can run on devices. C++
Cobra - .Net renderer using anti grain library created by Ferdi
Anyone created others?