[OSM-talk] Playing with Mapnik rendering

[Cameron Patrick]

Hi all,

This would possibly be more appropriate on talk-au, but I suspect
there's a higher concentration of Mapnik gurus and opinionated people on
talk@ ... yesterday I had a shot at making Mapnik render maps of my area
that look a bit more like some Australian street directories, where
roads are thin lines with names written above or below them.  Here's a
comparison showing a printed street map with Mapnik, Osmarender and my
tweaked Mapnik styles near where I live:

        http://largestprime.net/cameron/osm-tmp/nedlands-comparison.jpg

One thing I didn't manage to do was get Mapnik to render names either
above or below the lines for the roads, though.  Anyone know if this is
possible easily?

For reference, here's the area on the 'live' slippy map:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-31.98031630538444&lon=115.81060750479709&zoom=15

The Mapnik renderings in the image above are at zoom level 15, and is
osmarender is from zoom 16, scaled down using the GIMP because osma
doesn't show street names at zoom 15.

I switched on text rendering for areas like parks and universities to
make the map a little more informative, and changed the colours of the
roads a bit.  (Typically green indicates a freeway and blue a tollway in
Australian road maps.  The new colours feel a touch garish but I felt
the current Mapnik rendering was a bit dull.)  I also added a rule to
render place=suburb in bright orange.

So, having written all that, I'm not sure exactly where I'm heading ...
but this drawing maps stuff turns out to be more fun that I'd thought!

Cheers,

Cameron.