[OSM-dev] elemstyles.xml file, icons

[Joerg Ostertag]

Am Dienstag, 3. Juli 2007 11:02:34 schrieb Ulf Lamping:
> Joerg Ostertag (OSM Munich/Germany) schrieb:
> >> Sounds like a good approach. However, I just don't know how to do this
> >> in the mappaint build process :-(

Another possibility would be to set a symlink/propset inside the osm-svn from 
	applications/share/map-icons/ 
to	applications/editors/josm/plugins/mappaint/map-icons
This way we would only have one place to edit, but mappaint can build itself 
without dependency problems.


> In the current state, the different icon sets missing different icons,

The Idea behind this was to alway have a look at the tree structure. And if 
the specialized icon is missing you take the icon from the level above. The 
basic Idea behind this was to implement this inside the programm. That's at 
least how we implemented it in gpsdrive. But if this would be hard to do in 
mappaint; we/I can add a makefile which does this by copying them while 
compiling. 

> so it's probably not a good idea to simply use e.g. only the "square
> big" theme, as lot's of icons would be missing that are available e.g.
> in the "classic" theme. So in it's current state we'll need to get the
> "best of all worlds" for a icon set as complete as possible for mappaint
> IMHO.

I would like to try merging the mappaint icons into the classic theme; since 
they also have no frame.
Then I would try in a second step to see what square.big is missing out of 
them and try to create squared ones by merging the classic items with the 
square frames.


> One solution could be to use src="square.small/accommodation/hotel.png"

Yes, but my preference would be without the square.small/. Just configuring 
this somewhere else...


> in the xml and copy the whole map-icons dir into the mappaint.jar. But
> again, I currently don't know much about the mappaint build process, so
> at least for now I simply can't do it. Another option would be to build
> a "mappaint" icon set into map-icons, but that's probably not the
> intention to keep the icons in one place ;-)

Better merge them with the classic style. The seem to be very similar.

> However, I've experimented with this a bit in mappaint. First of all, in
> mappaint using any icons above the size of about 16*16 pixels is ugly
> and get's in the way of actually mapping things - and mappaint doesn't
> scale the icons automatically. Even if it would scale them
> automatically, to my experience it's often better to use e.g. The Gimp
> to scale down icons manually instead of relying on any JAVA build in
> scale algorithms, as the Gimp result will often look *much* better -
> especially for very small pictures like icons. Even using the Gimp some
> icons get's too blurred to be useful when scaled down to 16*16 pixels.

What about setting up a classic.small and classic.big? And let the make 
process create the missing ones; but not put them into svn. This way you can 
replace any not good looking one with your own gimp-rescaled and put it into 
svn to make the map look better at this place.

> For this reason, a lot of the icons in the current sets won't fit good
> into mappaint - I don't know if that's true for the other renderers or not.

Maybe with the big/small trick it might work.
 
-
Joerg