[OSM-newbies] Coastline Rendering

[Zeke Farwell]

Hi there fellow OSMers,

I seem to be one of the few US based people getting involved in this project
(in my area of the northeast at least).  I live in northern Vermont, and the
first order of business for me has been getting Lake Champlain to show up.
It's a very large lake on the border of Vermont and NY state that didn't
exist at all in OSM a month or so ago when I started.  I've since traced
ways roughly around the lakeshore and linked them all together to make a
closed polygon (in a clockwise direction so the renderers will be happy).  I
tagged the connected ways as "natural=coastline" since the renderers don't
recognise "natural=lakeshore".  Also, this seems to be what the Great Lakes
to the west of me are tagged as, and they currently display quite nicely in
both Mapnik and Osmarender.  Lake Champlain also has three large islands in
the middle of it which I have traced counterclockwise and also tagged as
"natural=coastline".  At first I thought I would need to use relations to
make a mulipolygon, but it seems that the Great Lakes off which I am basing
this one do not use multipolygons and islands show up just fine in them.  So
I haven't bothered with that yet.

So to cut to the chase:  I'm been messing around with this for a while now.
I got parts of the lake to show up in Osmarender, and in the Coastline
Viewer but with errors.  Finally over this past week It showed up with no
errors in the Coastline Viewer.  But the Islands did not show up.  This past
week it also showed up perfectly in Osmarender, except for one square chuck
of an island is blue (I don't know why).  So I thought I had it all figured
out, and come Wednesday when The Mapnik update arrived Lake Champlain would
be visible.

The update has come and gone, and my lake is nowhere to be found in Mapnik.
Here are links to the area in the three views mentioned:
Mapnik<http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=44.551&lon=-73.344&zoom=10&layers=B00FTF>
, Osmarender<http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=44.549&lon=-73.344&zoom=10&layers=0B0FTF>,
and Coastline Viewer<http://tile.openstreetmap.nl/coastlines.html?zoom=10&lat=44.52355&lon=-73.26782&layers=B00T>
If anyone cares to take a look at them and at how I have tagged the ways, I
would certainly appreciate any insight as to why this lake is stil invisible
in Mapnik (and why this islands don't show up in the Coastline Viewer).  I
know the coastlines and the lower zoom levels are rendered with Shapefiles
in Mapnik.  Does this have something to do with it?  Do you think if I wait
another week the lake may show up?

Mystified,

Zeke Farwell
Vermont, USA
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