[OSM-dev] Rendering of long street names for short streets

[Michael Ritzert]

Hi,

Florian Lohoff wrote:
> Putting explicit abbreviation onto all streets is a huge overkill.
> I'd rather vote for a simple abbreviation dictionary in the svn
> which is renderer agnostic. I am not shure on how to include
> the abbreviation then as the renderer would need to chose the name
> based on the space available.

I had once (locally) tested a patch for T at H to try and find shorter
names for streets when there is little space. The patch itself was
rather easy, but getting the location dependency in the process was
harder. For my tests, I created an input file where each road had the
is_in tag correctly set. With this information, I was able to
distinguish between for example Spanish "Calle"s which are abbreviated
as "C/" (and several other options) or left out completely and Italian
"Calle"s to be shortened to "C.le".

I can probably implement a patch looking at a name:short or any other
tag for T at H if this is considered worthwile. However this would only
solve the special cases and not the common ones ("Straße" => "Str.")
since I hope we all agree that having two name tags for each "Straße" is
not the way to go.

For a more thorough solution, having a somewhat reliable way to find at
least the country a road is in would be required.

Michael