[OSM-dev] Nestoria Tiles Write Up

[Andy Allan]

On 10/26/06, Dave <osm at randomjunk.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> a) The label plotting isn't very good. Labels are often too big/too small,
> they follow the road path exactly even when segments don't order properly,
> they go upside down if the way is defined right to left, but they should
> always be left to right (in English at least), they go round corners in ways
> when they could easily have been plotted on a straight bit, and they don't
> merge when multiple ways have the same name (look at dual carriageway
> primary roads where the carriageways are close together for how nasty this
> can be). What worries me here is whether it's actually possible to do
> anything about any of this in XSLT? I don't know too much about XSLT (other
> than some basics), but it doesn't strike me as being very easy to implement
> label heuristics in.
>

There was a suggestion on the writeup along the lines of
"osmarender:nameDirection=-1" tagging, which I think is completely the wrong
way of doing it. Like Dave, I don't know about XSLT, but in a client that
can do SVG DOM, perhaps a script could walk the list of streetnames, and see
which ones have a negative L-R vector, and invert them. Is enough infomation
available in the SVG DOM for this? Making it post-XSLT would allow maps to
be made without north being up - encoding direction into the tagging would
break down immediately if I wanted a rotated map.

Similarly, perhaps something similar to this could be used for non-path
names (I'm thinking Pub names, Town names and so on) that currently overlap:
http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.openstreetmap.org-
a nice proximity-based algorithm to move the labels around gently
until
they are no longer overlapping.
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