[OSM-newbies] cycle map rendering

[Richard Fairhurst]

Thomas Meller wrote:

 > agree! agree! agree!
 >
 > Yes, that's exactly what I am missing.
 > Render the motorways grey if you like
 > render primary roads white if you like
 > render footpaths in a light color if you like
 > render paths as thin black lines if you like
 >
 > But render them.

"no! no! no!"

A map with everything on looks like a bollocks. The art of cartography 
is knowing what to include, and what not to. So when you say

 > Interpretation of the map is the map-user's job.
 > No-one else's decision or resposibility.

then I disagree absolutely. It's the cartographer's job to present an 
attractive set of information.

I think Andy, as maintainer of OpenCycleMap, does an excellent job - as 
do many other people. Comments such as your "I ask myself, what is it's 
use?" and "it's not really usable" really are verging on the offensive. 
It's not really usable _for_ _you_. For me and for many others it's 
great. That's not to say I'm right and you're wrong, of course, but 
neither is it to say that you're right and I'm wrong.

None of this stuff is easy. Craig Wallace's message is another 
interesting example:

> The main problem is the cycle map doesn't render anything tagged with
> highway=path.
>
> This has been requested many times, over the past few months, but it
> still hasn't been fixed.

Again, no. The main problem _for_ _you_; not necessarily for others. Not 
for me, for example, because UK mappers don't generally use highway=path.

Put yourself in the shoes of the cartographer. A bunch of wiki-fiddlers 
have unilaterally invented a new tag. That's their right, of course. You 
can use any tags you like. But from the outside, there doesn't seem to 
be any huge agreement on how it's used (I mean, what is this 
'designated' shit?), and so the render rules are going to have to be 
really complex to cope with the many possibilities.

If it were me I'd be tempted to say "well, I'm not going to even look at 
that until it's settled down". (It's only last week that I added 
highway=path to the Potlatch presets, for exactly that reason.) As it 
happens Andy has been looking at it: there's a table on the wiki in 
which he's been attempting to draw some sense out of the many complex 
permutations. But it isn't easy, and a whingey "it still hasn't been 
fixed" is not fair to someone who's put a lot of their spare time into it.



I am, to be honest, getting a bit dispirited by the "I want! I want! I 
want!" mentality that seems to be creeping into OSM. Traditionally OSM 
has taken the attitude that actions speak louder than words - SteveC 
referred to it in his FLOSS Weekly interview the other month. This 
should still be the case.

Happily, custom rendering is getting easier and easier, so you'll be 
able to make your own cycle map that renders the way you want. Look at 
projects like the awesome TileDrawer (http://tiledrawer.com/), 
CloudMade's Style Editor, Kosmos, and so on. It might not be 100% 
newbie-friendly yet, but it's getting there fast; and I hope to have 
something really cool to announce on the same subject in the next couple 
of weeks.

But please, enough of the "it doesn't do what I want/I don't understand 
it, so it's automatically bad". It's really, really dispiriting for 
those of us who are trying to improve the OSM toolset and keep as many 
people happy as possible.

cheers
Richard