[Talk-GB] Using OSM as a base for my own fictional map?

Martin Wynne martin at templot.com
Fri Jul 24 22:06:58 UTC 2020


Many thanks for the suggestions and links. A lot to take in there.

Zooming the tiles far enough to see the track detail is essential, so 
I'm wondering if I'm looking at doing this the wrong way.

It's not intended that the tiles would be viewed on a slippy map in a 
web browser. I'm writing a Windows executable to fetch them from the 
server and display them.

I have discovered that from the standard OSM map it is possible to 
download a vector file as a PDF of a selected area.

An EMF metafile would be preferable, but the PDF format is essentially a 
wrapper for metafiles, so it's not too difficult to convert PDF to EMF.

Which means I can programmatically remove the railway tracks by 
searching the metafile records for the relevant line styles and colours.

And then programmatically draw in the required new railway track.

 From the modified EMF I can generate the image tiles and upload them to 
my server.

Here's a quick test of that idea, showing the platforms and footbridge 
at the north end of Bewdley station on the SVR, with the OSM tracks 
replaced with detailed track:

  https://85a.uk/bewdley_osm_test.png

Here's the OSM map from which it was derived:

  https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/52.37590/-2.30719&layers=N

I need to work out how to do the attribution and any copyright issues. I 
can easily add the usual © OpenStreetMap Contributors caption on the 
corner of each tile. But is it permitted to modify and re-use the 
standard OSM map image in this way? What indication is required that it 
has been modified? The project will be free and open-source, there is no 
financial gain involved.

cheers,

Martin.



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