Sad update:
As you probably already guessed from the commit history in this repo, Kartograph.py is not maintained, which means that bugs are not being fixed and new features are not being added anymore. The original maintainer decided to move on with his life.
Bummer, I know! But... there is a great alternative!
I highly recommend using mapshaper instead. Mapshaper provides more features, runs a lot faster and, being a node package, mapshaper is much easier to install than kartograph.py ever was. The only thing mapshaper can't do (yet) is saving geo vectors as SVG file. But there are tons of other ways to do that.
Of course, if anyone wants to take over, kartograph.py is all yours.
Kartograph is a Python library that generates SVG maps from ESRI shapefiles. Please have a look at the API docs for more details.
Kartograph was created by Gregor Aisch and is supported by dpa-newslab, Piwik Web Analytics and the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Kartograph.py is licensed under AGPL
Kartograph.py is still beta, which means that there are some bugs left to fix.
However, feel free to test it while it is been developed. To do so I recommend to use virtualenv and virtualenv-wrapper.
> mkdir kartograph-py
> git clone git@github.com:kartograph/kartograph.py.git kartograph-py
# create and activate a new virtual environment
> mkvirtualenv kartograph
# install and use Kartograph
(kartograph)> cd kartograph-py
(kartograph)> python setup.py installSee install documentation