[OSM-talk] Mapping Reading, some impressions

[David Groom]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Chance" <tom at acrewoods.net>
To: <talk at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2006 11:14 PM
Subject: *** SPAM *** [OSM-talk] Mapping Reading, some impressions


> Ahoy,
>
> RobertS bullied me into mapping Reading (no, really), so we organised a
> mapping weekend and since then I've been doggedly editing and tweaking.
> Here's an osmarender of the work done so far:
> http://tom.acrewoods.net/files/osm/reading_large.png
>
> Here are my impressions of OSM, whinges and all (disclaimer: people work 
> hard
> on this, you're all volunteers, etc. I know, so I do mean to be polite and
> I'm really amazed at the work put in so far)...
>
>
> I first heard of OSM from SteveC at Open Tech last July, and showed a 
> vague
> interest in Robert's work in Bedford. My relevant backgrounds are in free
> culture and green politics. I'm really into the idea of Free geodata, and
> I've wanted to produce some specific maps of Reading for a while (nice 
> cycle
> rides and ethical spots). So that's what brought me into it.
>
>
> The weekend was great fun, a relatively easy way to produce useful free
> content in a sociable context. Since I do a lot of walking and cycling 
> around
> Reading it's also not too much bother mapping other parts, though doing it
> meticulously is a bit boring! :o)
>
>
> The web applet sucks. Really. Look at Reading and still almost nothing 
> shows
> up, the tiles are empty. This made it really difficult to persuade less 
> geeky
> people, who loved the idea, to get involved with the mapping weekend. Now 
> all
> I can show them are my osmarenders, which aren't nearly as impressive as 
> an
> attractive slippy map they can search. I've trawled the archives a bit so 
> I'm
> glad to see that people are aware of how much it sucks.
>
> Another slightly rubbish feature is the search bar. Separating city and
> ordinary search is confusing, and this is made worse by the fact that city
> search isn't immediately visible on the homepage. Search for 'Reading'
> or 'Southampton Street, Reading' (fairly standard, I would have thought) 
> and
> you get lots of street names with no indication as to where they are.
> Postcodes produce no results. If it must have these limitations, make them
> clear on the front page.
>
>
> JOSM - dialogues have a habit of collapsing into titlebars, and I've asked 
> the
> author to allow large/small GPX dots per layer, but otherwise it's great.
>
>
> osmeditor2 - slow and jerky, I've just used it to help trace physical 
> features
> like rivers, lakes and woods, based on sketches 'in the field'. Contours
> won't show up.

Not sure why you have a problem here, both the Linux & Windows versions work 
for me. You have to download the SRTM data to your computer first however.


> I can't work out the node/segment/way tools either, JOSM seems
> much more intuitive.
>
>
> Osmarender is nice, though it has many obvious flaws, such as:
> * road joints can mess up and look, well, disjointed
> * road names usually overlap with the casing

try adding dy=0.33 to each rule for road names.  For example

<text k="name" dy='0.33' text-anchor='middle' startOffset='50%' 
class="highway-unclassified-name" />


> * road names go nuts in enclosed spaces :)
> * abutters are OK, but look really messy in residential areas where you 
> have
> roads just slightly farther apart than the rendered blocks
> * pub labels make a mess rather than finding a neat way to fit in

open the svg file in something like inkscape, and drag the pub name to 
somehwre it fits in.  That the advantage of an SVG file, as iits easy to 
modify what was created by Osmarende.  As you say it would be virtually 
impossible too automatically get everything right.  Osmarender will do as a 
good a job as it can, but it needs a bit of human help afterwards to amke 
the output look really good.



>
> I'm guessing that some of those bugs would require a Turing machine to fix 
> :-)
>
> It's also not very clear how you make additions to the map features file. 
> I've
> got a growing customised file, based partly on the SVG Symbols wiki page,
> with definitions for woods, tracks, post offices, parking lots and pubs. 
> The
> result can be seen in the render I mentioned at the start of this email. 
> How
> do I help expand the osm-map-features.xml file? Where do I go if I have a
> suggestion but I don't know how to execute it? (e.g. cemetaries could be
> green with religious symbols in light grey, but I can only get the green
> background) The wiki isn't very helpful.
>
>
> On a related note, the "Proposed features" page is similarly opaque. How 
> do
> suggestions enter the official page? Should I just go nuts
> adding "sport=canoe", "freefood=cooking apples" and anything else I come
> across to the wiki and then tag them as such through JOSM, leaving it to
> someone else to move the idea to the official list?

Your right its about time some of the proposed features made it across to 
the map features page.  I've been meaning to move a few across myself.


>
>
> Front page - stick some pretty maps up there, like the featured maps on 
> the
> wiki, until the slippy map is up to scratch. Somebody said that before, I
> thought I'd second it!
>
>
> Wiki - other than what I have mentioned already, it looks like it's 
> getting
> ship shape :) My only bothersome bug at the moment is that when I uploaded 
> a
> new version of the osmarender that's displayed on the Reading page, it
> updates when you view the image but not in the thumbs shown in the page.

I think this sorts itself out after a few days, someone who is more expert 
on the wiki software may be able to expalin why.

David
> Hmph.
>
>
>
> Overall... I'm a bit of a dork, so playing with tools and digging around 
> the
> wiki don't phase me too much. I've had fun, and I'm almost ready to 
> finally
> produce the maps I've always wanted. Thanks, keep up the hard work, and I
> look forward to finding a tool that will produce tip-top renders without
> countless hours of tweaking in Inkscape.
>
> Regards,
> Tom
>
> -- 
> The task of critique is not to denounce the ideals, but to show their
> transformation into ideologies, and to challenge the ideology in the
> name of the betrayed ideal (Fromm – Beyond The Chains Of Illusion)
>
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