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

[David Lynch]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 02:18, Florian Lohoff<flo at rfc822.org> 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.

Having a standard set of abbreviations sounds good, but I think that a
tag is also necessary. There are places where names can be abbreviated
because of nearby streets with similar names, but where the
abbreviation wouldn't make sense elsewhere. For instance, in my city,
there is a short street called Anderson Square which you have to
travel on in order to get from one segment of Anderson Lane to
another. Putting "And. Sq." on a map here would make sense, but I
would disagree with the idea that "Anderson" => "And." works in all
situations.

> The street name above does exist in nearly every town in Germany
> so it makes sense to create the correct abbreviations once ...

On the other hand, the streets named after Martin Luther King in the
city where I live and the one where I went to university are
abbreviated different ways by locals (one uses "MLK," the other uses
just "King"), and neither is what I'd use as the shortest standard
abbreviation ("M L King").

-- 
David J. Lynch
djlynch at gmail.com