[Talk-ca] How should a noob proceed?

[Richard Weait]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:01 PM, Samuel Longiaru <longiaru at shaw.ca> wrote:

> 3) And this is a real noob question... in JOSM some nodes along a single
> isolated ways such as lake shores are marked with small boxes and some with
> +.  Can't seem to find any difference or rhyme or reason.  What is the
> significance of those?

I'll tackle this one first, because this feature, when it was added to
JOSM made my editing so much more fun.

You might be seeing the midpoint handles.

In JOSM, line segments may have a midpoint handle indicated with a
"+", even in "select" mode, with nothing else selected, you can grab
this handle an move it to a new location, creating a new node, but
staying in select mode.  It's a super quick way to add detail to a
rough sketch of an object.  Once you grab one of these handles and
move / drop it, it will turn in to a proper node, indicated by a small
square.  nodes that are junctions are indicated by slightly larger
squares.

Only longer segments will have these midpoint handles, so you can zoom
in to make them appear.