Improving Mapnik with Label Placement Algorithms

The Mapnik map renderer, used by the OpenStreetMap project, suffers from poor aesthetic qualities. One of the issues affecting the quality of the output is the placement of labels. Labels are too small, poorly positioned or missing altogether. As automatic label placement has been a subject of research in computer science, an obvious solution would be to apply one of the algorithms developed over the past two decades to the problem. This paper attempts to research, implement and evaluate such an algorithm that could be implemented within the flexibility and performance constraints of the OpenStreetMap project while providing accurate and visually pleasing output.