[OSM-talk] Pubs, stores, clubs and the way they are rendered

[Ulf Lamping]

Yann schrieb:
> Here is a screenshot from the center of london I took this morning:
> http://waste.mandragor.org/pubs.png
>
> It seems that pubs take a predominant place in the map. If we render 
> pubs, we will soon render clubs, stores, etc, directly on the mapnik 
> layer...
> I am afraid this will be a bit "too much" . On the screenshot I have 
> taken, the names of the pubs are written on top of the names of the 
> road, and having so many icons makes the map ugly (very personal point 
> of view I admit). Same for the recycle containers, having them 
> rendered (directly) on the map...
>
> On the other hand, these informations are useful, and should be 
> available. I would love to see these data as mashups, or added layers, 
> that we could enable/disable manually - instead of having them 
> directly rendered on the mapnik layer.
>
> What would you think?
If it's ugly or not, depends on what you're searching for. If your 
actually looking for "The George" pub you will find the information 
pretty helpful. If you want to have a look at the streets of London and 
not being interested in pubs at all, this does look ugly I must admit.

The first thing would be to make the icons smaller (they are only for 
hints, so no need to use 32*32 pixels). As I did exactly this for the 
JOSM mappaint plugin (max. 16*16, see 
applications\share\map-icons\classic.small in svn), I know it can be 
difficult to find a good icon set with so little pixels, but that's a 
problem that can be solved. The icons could even be transparent, so you 
might be able to see underlying street "contours" and street names even 
if there are lot's of icons.

The pub (and other) names written hides the underlying street names, 
which is a bad thing. So making the names transparent (if possible) or 
putting the names on a different layer might do the trick.

We might even need different layers: tourism, ammenity, sport, ..., 
otherwise a single layer might get ugly soon again if some more icon 
types are added. I don't know if the current topics is a good hint for 
layers, sounds like the special interest suits better here: tourist, 
bicycle, motorbike, resident, ...

Conclusion: Simply ommitting the data we have is probably a bad idea, so 
we need to find a good way to display it without making the map 
unreadable ...

However, unless someone finds the time / motivation to do something 
about it makes the whole discussion just a waste of time ;-)

Regards, ULFL