Thanks for the links to the stylesheets, they really help.

I just wrote a quick c++ program to extract the colors and various style / draw settings from it to generate the data tables that my c++ map renderer will use.

I am a bit confused though about the ocean / coastline rendering, I don’t see the data for it in the osm xml file. Is it in there?

The Mapnik xml stylesheet just refers to these files ( see below ), is this stored seperately from rest of the map data??

  <Layer name="world-1" status="on" srs="+proj=merc +datum=WGS84 +over">
    <StyleName>world-1</StyleName>
    <Datasource>
      <Parameter name="type">shape</Parameter>
      <Parameter name="file">/home/steve/world_boundaries/world_boundaries_m</Parameter>
    </Datasource>
  </Layer>

  <Layer name="world" status="on" srs="+proj=merc +datum=WGS84 +over">
    <StyleName>world</StyleName>
    <Datasource>
      <Parameter name="type">shape</Parameter>
      <Parameter name="file">/home/steve/world_boundaries/world_bnd_m</Parameter>
    </Datasource>
  </Layer>

  <Layer name="coast-poly" status="on" srs="+proj=merc +a=6378137 +b=6378137 +lat_ts=0.0 +lon_0=0.0 +x_0=0.0 +y_0=0 +k=1.0 +units=m +nadgrids=@null +no_defs +over">
    <StyleName>coast-poly</StyleName>
    <Datasource>
      <Parameter name="type">shape</Parameter>
      <Parameter name="file">/home/steve/world_boundaries/processed_p</Parameter>
    </Datasource>
  </Layer>

  <Layer name="builtup" status="on" srs="+proj=merc +datum=WGS84 +over">
    <StyleName>builtup</StyleName>
    <Datasource>
      <Parameter name="type">shape</Parameter>
      <Parameter name="file">/home/steve/world_boundaries/builtup_area</Parameter>
    </Datasource>
  </Layer>

Thanks
Kevin