[OSM-talk] international name rendering

[Hakan Tandogan]

>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Hakan Tandogan [mailto:hakan at gurkensalat.com]
>> Sent: 29 May 2007 22:44
>> To: David Earl
>> Cc: Talk Openstreetmap
>> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] international name rendering
>>
>>
>> David Earl wrote:
>> > 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).
>>
>> Those layers would have to be sparsely populated with the default "404"
>> tile being transparent. The tileGen script would have to dynamically
>> determine which tilesets for a given location (say, "tile", "maplint",
>> "placenames-en", "placenames-fr", ...) exist.
>
>
> That wasn't quite what I had in mind, though it is a possibility. I was
> thinking that there would only be one layer of text/icon (the icons being
> img references of course), and the visibility or otherwise of them being
> controlled by style sheets. That way, there's no complicated decisions to
> make about what goes on what layer,or what layers to download. The
> decision about what to see is done at run time.

I think the main purpose of t at h is to provide easy-to-use tiles for
applications / users that can't render them themselves, e.g. people with a
browser on the slippy map, the navigation applications on the Playstation
Portable, Nokia 770 and stuff like that.

If you are sure that your target is a modern web browser, you could send a
XML file with a style sheet and ask the browser to render the appropiate
place names itself, but that solution would leave the above mentioned low
powered devices high and dry...


Regards,
Hakan


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