[OSM-talk] Getting Started

[Dave]

On 22/02/07, Brett Henderson <brett at bretth.com> wrote:
>
> I've just started making some edits around Melbourne in Australia (where
> I live).



Yey! More maps!


However, I have a few questions.  Apologies if the info is available
> somewhere.
> 1. I'm a bit confused between mapnik and osmarender.  It seems like
> mapnik is newer but osmarender has more features.  Are there plans to
> phase one out or do they target different audiences?



They're developed by different people. In my (much disagreed with ;-) )
opinion, osmarender is better geared up for individual maps, for people who
want some base to play around with in an image editor etc, whereas mapnik
produces better slippy map tiles. This is mostly down to the handling of
labels, names etc, which I think mapnik will have a better chance of doing
proper placement, overlap avoidnce and things like that. Having said that
osmarender's labelling has come on leaps and bounds recently.

They both seem to be under active development, so this is probably one of
those areas where healthy competition will help everybody!


2. Are there ways I can force refreshes of the tile data?  The Melbourne
> maps seem pretty old in the slippy viewer both for mapnik and
> osmarender.  I've managed to get the tiles at home application running and
> can generate tiles, but I'm not sure how to get a login id to upload the
> results.  I've emailed Owj as mentioned on the wiki but haven't heard
> anything back yet.



for the mapnik layer it refreshes some time after it's viewed -- so if it's
very much out of date then no-one has had a look at it for a while. The
maximum refresh frequency is about weekly, usually sometime after the planet
comes out.
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