[Tagging] Basic cartography features missing, why?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 11/6/20 19:31, Anders Torger wrote:
> ** Tagging bays and straits as areas work great, as the renderer gets
> and idea how prominent it is and it can make proper text sizing and they
> can be seen even if zoomed out if the area is large. Lots of our lakes,
> even quite small ones have sub-naming, and with these features I can
> make really good mapping of this.

This is an absolute pain for me. We're seeing people define
ultra-precise multipolygons of various sizes with the single purpose of
getting a name rendered somewhere in a bay.

If this infects other areas of cartography, we'll see people build
thousand-node polygons for vaguely defined land areas ("the XY
lowlands", "the XY mountain range", "the XY plateau"). This is a very
sad development that makes editing more complicated and burdens the
database with information of very little value.

What people want to achieve is some lettering on the map, and because
the only way to get that is making huge polygons that purport do
describe the exact extent of something, that's what they do.

I think this needs to be stopped. We've created a
mapping-for-the-renderer mechanism by the back door. This is actually
*worse* than if we were to allow people to place a point somewhere and
annotate it with a desired label font size and orientation. Not that I
would advocate the latter, but what we have now has all the negative
features of the latter *plus* the side effect of creating giant,
unmaintainable polygons.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"