MinScaleDenominator

In a Mapnik XML Stylesheet the MinScaleDenominator indicates the minimum map scale at which a symbol or feature should be rendered.

One inch to the mile maps have a scale of 1:63,360, so setting MinScaleDenominator to be 63360 would mean that the symbol or feature would only appear when you render at a scale showing more detail than 1 inch to the mile.

Working out the map scale is a bit tricky. If you are rendering an area of 5,000 * 5,000 Spherical Mercator co-ordinates (ie. 5km * 5km) into a 1024 * 1024 pixel image then your map scale will be about 5m/pixel. Each pixel is assumed to be 0.28mm on your computer screen, so the scale value for your map would then be 5,000 mm / 0.28 mm which is approximately 18000.

Below is a table which shows the relation between zoomlevel and scale and which may help to see at which zoomlevel a feature is rendered or not:

Zoomlevel	Scale
0	559.082.264
1	279.541.132
2	139.770.566
3	69.885.283
4	34.942.642
5	17.471.321
6	8.735.660
7	4.367.830
8	2.183.915
9	1.091.958
10	545.979
11	272.989
12	136.495
13	68.247
14	34.124
15	17.062
16	8.531
17	4.265
18	2.133
19	1.066
20	533

Example: If you set MaxScaleDenominator inside of a style-file (eg. osm.xml) for a feature to 18.000 (without setting a MinScaleDenominator) this feature will be rendered on all tiles for zoomlevel 15 and higher.

If you want to know more about map scales, look at this link: ScaleAndPpi.