Painting Stages

Introduction

Maperitive draws maps in several stages. Each new stage draws on top of previous stages. The painting stages are (in order):

  1. MapBackground: if the map does not contain sea, this stage is used to draw the land background. If the map contains sea, this stage is used to draw the sea polygons.
  2. Landmass: if the map contains sea, this stage is used to draw the land (on top of sea polygons).
  3. BitmapBackground: in this stage raster images and Web map tiles are drawn (but only if they are configured to be drawn in the background).
  4. LandUse: this stage is used to draw all fill (TODO) symbols.
  5. BitmapForeground: in this stage raster images are drawn (but only if they are configured to be drawn in the foreground).
  6. Infrastructure: in this stage all contour (TODO) and line (TODO) symbols are drawn.
  7. Symbols: in this stage all icon and shape symbols are drawn.
  8. Labels: this stage is used to draw all text symbols.
  9. BitmapOverlay: in this stage Web map tiles are drawn (but only if they are configured to be drawn in the foreground).
  10. MapLegend: this stage is used to draw map decoration elements, like the map grid and the map scale.

Techniques

You can use map.min-painting-stage, map.max-painting-stage and map.hidden-painting-stages settings to control which stages will be painted. This can be useful if, for example, you want to render a map without any text labels - you can use the existing rendering rules without any modifications.

See also: