[OSM-talk] Osmarender4 slippy map (preview)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    with some help from Jochen I have now managed to use Osmarender4  
with the tiles at home scripts to generate slippy map tiles. I have  
rendered portions of Karlsruhe, London, and Cambridge, and put them  
on a slippy map for you to view:

http://openstreetmap.gryph.de/slippymap/

For a better old-new comparison, the "+" layer switch button in the  
top-right corner can be used to switch between the old Osmarender map  
(from the dev server) and the Osmarender4 tiles provided by my server.

The styles (XML files for Osmarender4) that have been used can be  
downloaded here

http://openstreetmap.gryph.de/slippymap/mapfeatures.tgz

I have tried to emulate the look of the old maps as far as possible;  
some things still look different because Osmarender4 renders things  
that were previously ignored, and I fiddled around a bit to make it  
look ok.

(Among the major changes are, as far as I remember, bridges/tunnels,  
light rail+tram, much better text rendering along streets - where  
still imperfect, that's often due to wrong order of segments - and  
rendering of unwayed segments at zoom levels 14 and finer.)

I would like to get the Osmarender4 modifications for tiles at home into  
production use as soon as possible. The tiles are similar enough not  
to force us to re-render the whole world at once when that happens,  
but I guess there will nonetheless be an effort to replace old-style  
tiles quickly. I will deploy the changes to SVN, and participiants in  
the tiles at home rendering will then be asked to upgrade their  
software. (@OJW: do you think we should add a version parameter to  
the upload script, so that the API can reject uploads with missing/ 
too old version code?)

I think there are quite some strange things about the slippy map  
layout as it is currently, especially the change in style between  
levels 13 and 14, but also some font size decisions and what is and  
is not rendered at various zoomlevels. However, I would rather not  
get into a full-blown discussion about that now (perhaps a good thing  
to discuss at the proposed Oxford meeting?); for now, I really opt  
for emulating the existing style without thinking too much about it.  
Otherwise we'll never get the Osmarender4 slippy map off the ground.

So my question to you is: Do you see anything in the above examples  
that is uglier than it was before, or so different that it breaks  
something, or any other reason why we shouldn't go ahead with this?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'