[OSM-dev] OSM for Retina and high-pixel density devices

[Paul Norman]

On 1/27/2015 2:00 PM, Antje wrote:
> I wonder if developers have considered high-pixel-density support for tiles for any device, whether it’s a Mac or not.
The openstreetmap-carto developers have been changing POI and other 
icons from PNGs to SVGs for better high-resolution support, which would 
include "retina" tiles. Unfortunately, released versions of Mapnik don't 
support SVGs for background patterns, which would be a problem for some 
features. I don't think any other developer work is required - 
mod_tile/renderd already support scaling tiles 
(https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile/pull/82)

It would be up to the system administrators and OWG to decide if they 
wanted to deploy retina tiles. Deploying a second set of tiles would 
increase the CDN cache miss rate, increase the rendering required, and 
significantly increase the disk space required for tiles. The last is 
likely to be particularly significant as I don't believe the machines 
have the free disk required to more than double the cache.