[OSM-newbies] AussiePaul (newbie) mapping problems

[Andrew Errington]

On Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:32:01 Paul wrote:
> Hi, I'm new here and have been trying to learn.
<snip>

Welcome!

There are two reasons that your edits might not show up on the Mapnik map:

1) There is a delay between submitting new data and Mapnik drawing new map 
tiles.  Clearly you are aware of this, and it has been mentioned already.
2) There may be an error in your tags, so Mapnik may not recognise the object 
you submitted.
3) Oh...

There are three, three reasons that your edits might not show up on the Mapnik 
map:

3) Mapnik does not render all objects.  Or all objects at all zoom levels.  
For example, Convenience Stores are not rendered (grr!), so if you submit 
data for a convenience store it will never show up.

One thing you can is click on the '+' sign at the top right hand edge of the 
map.  This will show the layer menu.  Click on the 'Data' checkbox.  This 
will overlay grey lines and green dots which represent the data in the 
database, and will also show a list of objects on the left side of the map.  
Usually the data overlay will line up with the Mapnik map, but if you edited 
something then you can see two things.  Firstly, you can see if there is a 
discrepancy between the data overlay and the map.  This tells you that Mapnik 
has not yet rendered the current data.  Secondly, you can click on objects in 
the object list and see that they contain the data that *you* submitted (e.g. 
you added a street name, and the name is present on the object).  If you did 
something but the data does not show it then there was a problem.

I hope my explanation is clear, and I apologise if you knew all this already.

Best wishes,

Andrew