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

Christoph Hormann chris_hormann at gmx.de
Wed Jan 28 23:20:39 UTC 2015


On Wednesday 28 January 2015, Michael Meier wrote:
> [...]
>
> However, in addition to the problem of limited resources, I don't
> think the style is ready yet. Though there has been a lot of progress
> lately, the openstreetmap-carto-style has many symbols, and many
> still aren't SVG and thus are not "HD ready" - they look really ugly
> in HD tiles.

Non-scalable elements in the style are only part of the problem.  In 
general nearly all maps rely on the rasterization to perform necessary 
spatial frequency filtering or in other words: they cannot change 
output resolution independent from the level of detail.

If you for example compare 

https://c.osm.rrze.fau.de/osmhd/6/35/18.png
https://c.osm.rrze.fau.de/tiles/7/71/36.png

or

https://c.osm.rrze.fau.de/osmhd/8/133/85.png
https://a.osm.rrze.fau.de/tiles/9/267/171.png

or

https://a.osm.rrze.fau.de/osmhd/8/132/75.png
https://c.osm.rrze.fau.de/tiles/9/265/151.png

You can see that apart from the styling differences between the zoom 
levels and the differences in label sizes these look identical.  But 
for good readability on high resolution devices you do not want the 
additional details which are too small to be properly read leading to 
mushy results, you want better acuity with the same amount of detail.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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