alaCarte Maps

an OpenStreetMap tile renderer

About alaCarte

alaCarte is a tile renderer for OpenStreetMap data written in C++11, using Cairo for rendering and Boost-Spirit for MapCSS parsing.

The rendered tiles are served over HTTP using the Slippy map tilenames convention.

To compute which data is needed for rendering a tile, alaCarte uses a variant of a STR-Tree.

alaCarte was designed with medium dataset size in mind. On a typical machine with at leat 8GB RAM, alaCarte can handle a unfiltered export from the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg (Germany).

alaCarte was developed as part of a lab course student software project at KIT. For the old project files (mostly in German), see the old project repository.

Features

  • easy to use
  • most MapCSS attributes are implemented (see MapCSS wiki page for comparison)
  • no need to filter OSM exports, you have full access to all attributes at runtime
  • stylesheets are updated at runtime (changes are detected automatically)
  • tiles can be rendered in groups ("meta tile") to speed up rendering