[Talk-us] Can-Amera border, states and provinces.

[Richard Weait]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 1:30 PM, James Ewen<ve6srv at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I noticed the other day that the multipolygon relationship that you
> created to define the Canada US border has a gap in it. Not sure if
> was just missed, or if Paul Shipley made the hole. Paul last touched
> it in July, after you created it in May.

[ ... details clipped ]

> Did we ever come up with a solution for having provincial and state
> borders show up at a reasonable zoom level for the North American
> Continent without "tagging for the renderers"? Canada and the USA are
> massive blank spots on the map. Defining the provincial borders is
> nearly useless as they can never be seen until you're zoomed in so
> close that you have to go into editing mode to figure out what the
> line on the screen is supposed to be.

Dear James, and All

I think the provincial / state borders will continue to be yucky on
the main map until mapnik supports rendering different style sheets
per region / country.  We, in North America, get to see what is
essentially a European style sheet, and as those countries are
smaller, rendering their states / provinces at zoom 3 is just as
stupid as not rendering ours at zoom 3.  So until mapnik and
osmarender support regional stylesheets we are Euchred.

As an interim measure, and just thinking out loud here,
openstreetmap.ca and openstreetmap.us could certainly deliver tiles
rendered from a North American-focused stylesheet.  That would be
great.  But it means work for the owners of those domains.

I'd be happy to do some of the stylesheet work to get it looking
better, but we need a place to put it.

Best regards,
Richard

P.S. re Sam's suggestion, just changing the admin level sounds like
the wrong approach to me.