This should be more aimed to answer “I want to pre-render some tiles; what do I need? what can I use? what should I use? what is the best and fast way to accomplish this?”
(personally I am interested in a renderer that is as simple and efficient as possible, reading data from a postgis database, just to pre-render some layers)
Locally I did use TileCache (http://tilecache.org/) for small areas (but always on-demand, without pre-rendering), but somehow it feels “inefficient” (or resource-intensive) to render tiles from lower level zooms; there is also TileStache (http://tilestache.org/) which seems to be very similar to TileCache.
I was thinking if we could create a new table complementing this one https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Renderer#Server_and_command_line_tools or even update/improve it, with columns like:
-
ease of use/simplicity* (will the user need to run a lot of complex commands?)*
-
dependencies* (will the user need to compile/install a lot of stuff?)*
-
style type that it uses/needs* (does it need a Carto project? can use MapCSS directly? proprietary format? etc)*
-
can pre-render* (only needed if some programs can’t pre-render)*
-
performance/efficiency* (will it need a lot of memory to render? is it the fastest renderer? how resource-intensive it is?)*
-
other important features
One part is, of course, what would be the best option to pre-render tiles; the other part would be how could we organize a table or wiki with the available options and features information (to have this kind of information available for other users like me :))