[OSM-talk] Fw: Osmarender 3.0

[Nick Whitelegg]

>I agree on that. The live map needs to be fast and - even more important 
-
>each tile (or in this case cached area) has to fit the next one. I think
>it is far easier to have two map servers:

>- one for the general public, updated on a daily basis. Read-only DB, 
fast
>access, perhaps filtered data (things the map renderer cannot display can
>be left out; Optimizations that speed up client-side rendering can be
>done).

>- one for developers and mappers, a bit hidden (in the wiki). This one
>could use direct access to the database, accessable only with login - and
>because of much less users, even work without caching.

>The SVG map needs to be faster than the current osmarender interface,
>though. I appreciate the beauty of the osmarender approach, but I'm not
>sure if the slippy map for the general public should use the in-browser
>conversion (because it's slow for dense areas). Especially for older
>computers, this is a serious problem because SVG rendering alone takes
>much time.

>It might be best to generate (and optimize!) the SVG on the server and
>store it in the database, instead of just shoveling OSM data around.
>Perhaps I'm wrong and the conversion takes only a small percentage of the
>time it takes to render the SVG. I can not measure that.

I don't think the suggestion was to use SVG for the slippy map; as you say 
that would probably be better done from a read-only, planet.osm based 
database without versioning information - as done by Freemap. The idea was 
more to add a web-based interface to osmarender, so that people who wanted 
to get a high-quality SVG map of their area could do so easily.

Another issue which ideally needs to be solved is being able to save the 
SVG to file for import into Inkscape (for conversion to PNG); this does 
not seem to be possible in Firefox - if you view source you don't get the 
generated SVG, you just get the osm-map-features.xml. Is there a way round 
this, or will this be fixed in a future version of Firefox? 

Nick