Let's put together everything that we have learned to write a program that can display the contents of a shapefile. This is quite a useful program to have, as you can manipulate or generate some spatial data, save the results into a shapefile, and then run this program to display the shapefile's contents as a generated map image.

We'll call our program shapeToMap.py. Create this file, and start entering the following Python code into it:

import mapnik

LAYERS = [
    {'shapefile'  : "TM_WORLD_BORDERS-0.3.shp",
     'lineColor'  : "black",
     'lineWidth'  : 0.4,
     'fillColor'  : "#709070",
     'labelField' : "NAME",
     'labelSize'  : 12,
     'labelColor' : "black"
    }
]

BACKGROUND_COLOR = "#a0c0ff"

BOUNDS_MIN_LAT  = 35.26
BOUNDS_MAX_LAT  = 71.39
BOUNDS_MIN_LONG = -10.90
BOUNDS_MAX_LONG = 41.13

MAX_WIDTH  = 1600
MAX_HEIGHT = 800

Note that the various constants we have defined here will be used to configure the map that we are going to generate: