[talk-au] Custom highway shields

[John Smith]

While it might seem things have gone quiet on this front, there has
actually been some movement forward.

Firstly I figured out how easy inkscape is to make custom shields of a
tourist route which uses icons instead of numbers.

All I had to do was simply take a reasonably photo of the sign, and
then using the tracing function in inkscape I got this out:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Image:Shield_australia_tourist_dugong.svg

This sign is used for both the Northern and Southern Moreton Bay
Tourist Drives around Brisbane.

I also managed to make one of the wagon wheel tourist sign near Gatton in Qld:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Image:Shield_australia_tourist_wheel.svg

I've also spent a fair bit of time on how to efficiently turn the
lookup table on the wiki page into something useful code wise so these
custom shields start to render, and for more than just Australia as
Hawke has been collecting and putting up SVG images of US highway
shields on the wiki:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Custom_Highway_Shields#United_States_of_America

So far we think we know what needs to be done, it's just a case of
publishing a working proof of concept and from there tweaking it to be
as efficient as possible.