[OSM-talk] Mapping Reading, some impressions

[Etienne]

On 9/4/06, Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net> wrote:
>
> 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. 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


I've seen this happen for roads made of segments rather than ways.  It can
also happen where two ways join.  The cause is stroke-linecap: butt; in the
CSS section of the rules file.  If you change all occurrences to
stroke-linecap: round; then it will probably go away.  The downside of this
change is that the ends of roads will be rounded (like Google maps) rather
than square.  There was some discussion here a while back that seemed to
infer that square ends were preferable.

* road names usually overlap with the casing


As David has said, adjust the dy to centre it, and maybe also adjust the
font size in the CSS section if you have changed the road width.

* road names go nuts in enclosed spaces :)


I don't have a solution to this at the moment.  Ideas and suggestions
welcome.

* abutters are OK, but look really messy in residential areas where you have
> roads just slightly farther apart than the rendered blocks


Most computer generated maps shade residential areas as an area rather than
using the abutters style that Osmarender is using.  I've been thinking for a
while that we should be marking residential areas as areas rather than using
the abutters tag.  boundary=residential perhaps.

* pub labels make a mess rather than finding a neat way to fit in


For a map of a whole town you maybe shouldn't be wanting to display the name
of every pub.  I'd just show the icon and remove the <name> rule from the
rules file.

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?


If you post your suggestions here or on the wiki then they should eventually
find their way into SVN.

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.


I'd like to know how to do that one as well.  It's primarily an SVG
problem.  So an SVG forum would be a good place to start.  Once we have some
useful SVG then the OpenStreetMap dev mailing list would be a good place to
discuss how Osmarender could generate the required output.

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?


I think the idea was that once a proposed feature has been up for a
"reasonable amount of time" if there is no dissent then it should just get
promoted to the features page.  That kind of wooly process doesn't seem to
work too well around here though.  Maybe we need to have votes on the
relevant talk pages, and the original proposer having responsibility for
moving it to the official Map Features page.

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.
> 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)
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20060905/11ec7359/attachment.html>