[OSM-talk] international name rendering
Barnett, Phillip
Phillip.Barnett at itn.co.uk
Tue May 29 18:53:22 BST 2007
+1 from me
PHILLIP BARNETT
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-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org
[mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of David Earl
Sent: 29 May 2007 18:42
To: Talk Openstreetmap
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] international name rendering
While rendering national variations in names may be reasonable in the
short
term, I don't think it is a good longer term solution. And giving
priority
to English as the second language when there are multiple name:whatever,
as
was suggested, is a rather biased approach.
Here's another approach that gives other benefits as well (some of you
will
have seen this before). I know this is much harder than a change in
rendering, which is why I'm describing it as long term.
- render the map areas, ways and street names as at present, but leave
off
all node-related and otherwise "horizontally" rendered text and all
icons.
(This should mean compressed tiles are smaller in general.)
- render a separate overlay (maybe more than one) map tile as html (or
maybe
some alternate format - perhaps more compact - that javascript can
understand), which includes label text and icons. (Do it by tile, and
take
zoom into consideration, not try to render from the database, which
would be
chronically slow; and by tile relative pixel coordinates and absolute
positions).
This then means that text and icons are independent but rapidly output
entities. They can be panned as per the map images straightforwardly
enough.
But the key thing is that by judicious use of styles, one can
dynamically
turn on or off items according to user preference. So in the context of
this
discussion, one could have a "French" layer in preference to an English
layer (where name:fr is selected for display if it exists, in preference
to
just name); or a layer that includes schools (icons and names) or not,
or
mountain peaks or not, etc, to get the information the user wants to see
without the map looking too cluttered.
It's also a way of dealing with those short streets with long names that
won't fit - put them in the text/icon layer as horizontal text (mind
you,
they could be rendered into the tile like this in any case).
This doesn't address street names in multiple languages, but that is
rarer
than multilingual place names. But it is symmetrical for all languages
at
least for the text/icon layer.
David
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