Artem Pavlenko, the original developer of Mapnik, set out with the explicit goal of creating beautiful maps[2] by employing the sub-pixel anti-aliasing of the Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG) library.

For handling common software tasks such as memory management, file system access, regular expressions, and XML parsing, Mapnik utilizes the Boost C++ libraries.

Current plugins exist that utilize OGR and GDAL to read a range of vector and raster datasets.

Mapnik is a cross platform toolkit that runs on Windows, Mac, Unix-like systems like Linux and Solaris (since release 0.4).

[8] Mapnik is free software and is released under LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public Licence).