[Talk-ca] Maperitive

[john whelan]

Maperitive is a client that renders on the PC.  This gives you much more
control over what and how things are rendered.

One problem I've had with OSM is entering points of interest such an
playgrounds or stores such as video only to have them not appear on the
render.  Another is how to get the French version of the street name to
appear easily.  I also wondered about creating maps that only had
information I was interested in.  So I played.

I copied the relevant video and playground .png files to a local folder
called icons under Maperitive then referenced them in a set of rules.  Take
things out of the rules and what you aren't interested in disappears.

I built a couple of .bat files that fired up Maperitive with a script with
the relevant set of rules.  Works quite well and if my memory serves me
correctly I can drop an icon on the desktop that triggers a .bat file.

The reason its important is that it appears to be quite feasible to put an
OSM file on a dvd together with a couple of .bat files, rule sets etc and
Maperitive and you can then easily display selected information from an
icon.  ie display tourist POIs or just the car parks and don't clutter the
map with lots of junk I don't want.  It also becomes a commercially
interesting product, dvds are cheap enough these days that they get given
away as freebies to promote various things.  The other side of this is if
you are printing a handout with a map you can omit POIs to make your map
clearer.

It also makes me wonder if it would be an idea to have an icons folder with
the .png files in it as part of the install.  That way you could just add
lines to the rules that referenced the local .png files and not have to go
digging across the web to find things.  This link seems to have a good
collection.  http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/share/map-icons/

Thoughts?

Cheerio John
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