[OSM-newbies] cycle map rendering

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Tue Sep 8 04:30:59 BST 2009


I love the cycle map. I love the contours and shading. I use
it for 4WD driving, and for general armchair exploring and trip planning.
Ironically, it's no good for bicycling since it doesn't show the
mountain bike trails, so that's one thing I never use it for.

Thomas Meller writes:
> Yes, that's exactly what I am missing.
> render footpaths in a light color if you like
> render paths as thin black lines if you like
> 
> But render them.

Around here, a map is useless for mountain bikes if it doesn't
render bicycle=yes paths. The best bicycle trails are all paths,
but there are lots of highway=path that don't allow bicycles,
so just showing all paths would be great for hikers and
useless for MTBs.

I've never tried to complain about that; I assumed it was designed
for European road bikers, not US mountain bikers, and I still find
it very useful for other purposes.

Richard Fairhurst writes:
> 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 

Which is the unilaterally invented new tag?  highway=path?  Is there
a better tag to use for a narrow (say 1.5m wide) dirt trail winding
through a forest that allows hikers, bikers and horses? What tag
would a UK mapper use for such a trail?

> 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.

I've been trying for a long time to figure out how to render my
own maps that include togographic contour lines like the cyclemap.
I once tried to follow
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contours combined with
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/HikingBikingMaps and
after about 10 hours over two days of downloading and installing and
setting up multiple databases and finding Ubuntu workarounds I
ran out of time and downloaded a bunch of cyclemap tiles instead. 
I keep meaning to go back to it once I get a free week to devote
to it -- a couple days at a time clearly isn't long enough.

Tiledrawer looks like it can only handle OSM data, not extra data
like contours, so it wouldn't replace the cyclemap.

If you know of a straightforward solution, I'd love to hear about it.

> 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 

Agreed. The cyclemap is way cool even if it doesn't have everything
I wish for personally. I use it a lot and am very glad to have
it available.

	...Akkana




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