[OSM-talk] Osmarender based slippy map

[Dave]

>
> I did this map the
> other day:<http://www.mozoft.com/OSM/maps20061119/link_hires/>. Nothing
> tweaked in osmarender, except to render segments and do highres bitmap. Is
> this also rubbish?


A bit, yes:

   - segments making up primary/trunk/motorway ways don't meet properly
   going round corners (doesn't seem to be a join specified or osmarender
   doesn't create the way as a path in the SVG, dunno which)
   - half the street names are truncated, or else split in weird ways
   across the way
   - another half of the names are upside down
   - none of the text is in the middle of the roads, it's always stuck to
   one side (I think this might be the renderer ignoring the baseline tag?)

You benefit from having a nice sparse dataset, no complex wiggly roads going
round in spirals etc., and no labels competing for the same location, which
are things that often look rubbish on my maps.

You don't notice any of this stuff when you zoom out, then it looks great. A
fair few of these criticisms can probably be fixed with some
tweaking/development work.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying osmarender is useless, or rubbish.
I'm just saying I think the mapnik stuff looks nicer at the moment at these
kinds of scales, and personally I believe it has more potential for solving
some of the more difficult problems including label positioning. Truth is I
wouldn't be doing any OSM without osmarender: some of the maps on the wiki
looked awesome and provided good inspiration (slippy map wasn't working at
all really at that point). And osmarender still has a place in a mapnik
slippy map world: mapnik doesn't look like an easy install, it has a
dependency list as long as my arm, and doesn't produce nice editable SVGs,
which if I ever wanted to produce a poster or something with a map I'd
probably find very useful.

The svg->png processor was rsvg. Has anyone noticed any obvious problems
with this? (other than it ignores text paths completely)
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