Experience with Mapnik
For some reason, I needed to use mapnik to render the .osm file into tiles (png format), and I started my long journey with mapnik. The task is to render the text label layer only, without any background geographical features.
Things started off smoothly. I found python already have pip installation for mapnik so I simply typed pip install mapnik to install it on my machine. I followed the tutorial here and successfully reproduced the output.