[OSM-dev] lowzoom

[spaetz]

CC'd to t at h and dev, sorry for crossposting

Hi all, you might have noticed the "new" lowzoom look in t at h.

First, the positive side: I do merge the "caption" layer into the new lowzooms from z5-11.
On the negative side: either the captions are done with XSLT osmarender which has projection issues in lowzoom (see how city names get moved in z6) or we use or/p which gets projection right but cannot suppress text labels when there are too many. Both issues are something that a potential developer could/should have a look at.

I tried to get something where lowzoom tiles did not look too pale (as Etienne had complained about). Unfortunately tweaking the contrast also means that the blue water looks - err, interesting -. (In addition the transparency of caption tiles is not always recognized, leading to those little white borders around text labels...)

In short, it needs much more tweaking until I am happy with it. But by exposing it to the public, I hope to increase the pressure to fix those renderer deficiencies :-). If people want to have a look at how to make lowzooms look nicer, they are welcome too. All the code is in SVN in the file stitch_lowzooms.py.

I'll keep it running for now (which means it will run the next 3 weeks, as I'll be mostly offline). So they should be autogenerated for all areas where a z12 tile has been changed (about once a day). If you feel that captions are ugly, feel free to upload better caption tiles into the caption layer at z6-11.

Comments, flames, and patches welcome,

spaetz