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<TITLE>RE: osm pre-processing API. Was: Re: Intelligent fitting street names in OSMarender</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Barry,<BR>
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I'm pleased to see that you are working on a pre-processing API. I wrote some of the Mercator projection code in osmarender, and did consider a perl pre-processing step at the time. In the end I went with the xslt version, simply because the advantages of pre-processing the projection did not justify new dependencies. Since then tiles@home has really taken off, and we're starting to see lots more really clever stuff.<BR>
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To be honest I was fairly surprised you opted for a post-processing step for the bezierification, but I'm sure that's been discussed to death by now. The big advantage of doing it pre-processing is that we can put tags in the ways/nodes to fine-tune the process.<BR>
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I don't think post-processing the text placement was necessarily a bad idea - it certainly needs to happen after the projection from geographic to image coordinates, and needs to know which render style is to be used in order to get fontsizes - but a pre-processing step isn't out of the question.<BR>
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I think the text placement hinting could easily be extended to check for overlapping text and repeated text (e.g. when both lanes of a dual carriageway are labelled).<BR>
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Let me know when you have something setup and I'll update my code, and feel free to hack my code to death if you like. :-)<BR>
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Rob<BR>
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