[OSM-talk] Newbie - queries and usability suggestions

[Robert (Jamie) Munro]

bvh wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 03:12:42PM -0000, David Earl wrote:
>> (a) an order-of-magnitude better presentation that doesn't depend nearly so
>> much on how the segments are put together (I say this not as a criticism of
>> the huge voluntary effort that has already gone in, and also in recognition
>> that I should devote some of my time to it if I can); and also that happens
>> automatically (that seems to be coming).
> 
> Agree.

Alternatively, something could just straighten out ways whose segments
are out of order. Ideally it would work on submit of ways to the API,
but it could instead work periodically, or even on export from the API.

>> * it's not possible to split a Way with JOSM, so its a good strategy to make
>> ways as short as possible. Keep roundabouts separate and break a way at that
>> point. Where a way branches multiple times (some estates have the same name
>> for a street that has three or four or more branches), keep the longest
>> straightest path as the named Way. There's not much point in naming the
>> shorter branches at present because osmarender truncates these and they
>> aren't readable. Don't try to make all the branches a single Way or the text
>> goes all over the place.
> 
> I still think this is wrong. Ways that branch in 3, 4, 5 sides are very
> much a reality and after all we are modelling reality... If some renderers
> can't cope with this (related to your first point I quoted above), we
> should be looking into improving those renderers.

Absolutely. If we can't improve osmarender to automatically render names
of ways that branch in a nice way, we could add osmarender:[something]
tags to such ways telling osmarender how to treat the road for road name
label purposes. It's probably possible to write a script to add most of
these automatically. If these are going to be generically useful to
other renderers, then they could be called rendererhint:[somthing] tags
or something similar.

Robert (Jamie) Munro

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