[Talk-us] Another state route shield renderer and tutorial
Minh Nguyen
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us
Wed Jul 27 07:12:08 UTC 2016
A couple days ago, I posted a diary entry about rendering state-specific
highway shields using Mapbox tools. It's a topic of special interest to
the U.S. community, so I figured I'd give the talk-us list a heads-up
since not everyone reads the diaries regularly:
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Minh%20Nguyen/diary/39123>
The diary entry begins with a summary of the arguments for pictographic
shield rendering and the challenges facing renderers that attempt to
differentiate between each state's design. I also argued against using
regular expressions to select state route shields.
I developed a demonstration vector renderer, called Interstate, that
differentiates between the Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana state route
shields, despite ambiguous `ref=SR 123` tagging in both Ohio and Indiana:
<http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/minh/osm/interstate/>
Though Interstate is only a proof of concept design-wise, it runs on
production servers and mainstream software. The second half of the diary
entry walks you through the steps to create your own, prettier version
of Interstate using free Mapbox tools.
(Full disclosure: I work at Mapbox. But my motivation for posting the
tutorial is to nudge the community away from relying on regular
expressions to select shields and towards eventually using route
relations for that purpose.)
For now, I continue to point people to
<http://elrond.aperiodic.net/shields/> when I want to show them what
route relations are good for, but Interstate is another option when the
issue of way `ref` formats comes up.
--
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us
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