Maperitive is a client that renders on the PC. This gives you much more control over what and how things are rendered.<br><br>One problem I've had with OSM is entering points of interest such an playgrounds
or stores such as video only to have them not appear on the render.
Another is how to get the French version of the street name to appear
easily. I also wondered about creating maps that only had information I
was interested in. So I played.<br>
<br>
I copied the relevant video and playground .png files to a local folder
called icons under Maperitive then referenced them in a set of rules.
Take things out of the rules and what you aren't interested in
disappears.<br>
<br>
I built a couple of .bat files that fired up Maperitive with a script
with the relevant set of rules. Works quite well and if my memory
serves me correctly I can drop an icon on the desktop that triggers a
.bat file.<br>
<br>
The reason its important is that it appears to be quite feasible to put
an OSM file on a dvd together with a couple of .bat files, rule sets etc
and Maperitive and you can then easily display selected information
from an icon. ie display tourist POIs or just the car parks and don't
clutter the map with lots of junk I don't want. It also becomes a
commercially interesting product, dvds are cheap enough these days that
they get given away as freebies to promote various things. The other
side of this is if you are printing a handout with a map you can omit
POIs to make your map clearer.<br>
<br>
It also makes me wonder if it would be an idea to have an icons folder
with the .png files in it as part of the install. That way you could
just add lines to the rules that referenced the local .png files and not
have to go digging across the web to find things. This link seems to
have a good collection.
<a href="http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/share/map-icons/">http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/share/map-icons/</a><br>
<br>
Thoughts?<br>
<br>
Cheerio John