[Talk-ca] Merging ways

[James Ewen]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Adam Dunn <dunnadam at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's two methods to join two areas: you can delete the coincident
> segments and combine the two unclosed polygons (as you have tried), or
> you can use JOSM's "join ways" feature.
>
> What you are doing (the first method) should have worked, and I don't
> know why the two ways "don't want to stay joined together".

Not sure what was going on there, but Potlatch 2 didn't want to play nice.

I watched your videos and decided to give JOSM yet another go... I've
tried twice before and both times gave up in disgust with trying to
figure out the arcane logic behind using JOSM. Perhaps I have learned
a bit over the years using other editors, like Merkaartor, but this
time I had better luck.I still hate using an editor with defined
modes. There are far too many extra button presses to get it to just
do what you want. Just to add a node to an existing way I have to
press A, then click on the node, then hit ESC to stop adding a way.
Why not just shift-click on the way like you do in Potlatch? I found
where you can select having JOSM go to modeless like Potlatch but it
doesn't seem to make any changes.

Anyway, I think I managed to merge a few ways to create a one piece
version of Wolf Lake. I don't think I've buggered anything up, but
time will tell. About a week from now, if Wolf Lake disappears, we'll
know why.

Video tutorials like the ones you made are a great help. Trying to
follow along in a written help file can be pretty tough if you have no
idea what they are telling you to look for, or where to find the
buttons to press. The video help was nice and easy to follow, and I
was able to replicate the instructions given without having to go back
and watch the video again to figure out what you had done.

Thanks for the help Adam!


BTW, what do you do with an entity that has over 1000 nodes? You said
you don't like to make any that big. Do you just arbitrarily cut lakes
or forests into bits? Should I just leave the Canvec tile boundaries
in place if the lake is too big? When you zoom in, the lines show up,
which isn't all that desirable. The only other way to reduce the
number of data points would be to reduce the precision level of the
depiction of the feature, which also is not desirable.

-- 
James
VE6SRV