Mapnik use advise, output to jpg/png?

[John Birchman]

Hello:

I have a project I have been working on, where I use a shaded relief background layer (Natural Earth II), radar gif images, and a city, highway county, and state overlay.  These are composite every 5 minutes to create a image that is used for a custom purpose.  These images are not part of a web site, so can not be done as a embedded map on a web page.  The initial background and foreground images are created once by hand, and then the sizing and offset to match the radar images are also done by hand the first time, and then these are added to a script that does the composites every 5 minutes automatically from then on.  I am trying to find a way to automate the portions I am doing by hand, as that is time consuming.

I have looking around at Mapnik capabilities, but not finding a concise answer or example. 

With Mapnik on a server, is is possible through scripting, to combine maps and other compatible map layers, specifying a center lat, lon point, and image size (1920x1080 for example) and output to jpg/or png?

If so, are there any good places to start with use examples similar to what I am trying to do, so I can look into this more closely?

Thanks for any information or ideas.  I am sure this is possible, just trying to figure out the best way to do it.

John