[OSM-talk] JOSM interface direction

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi Paul,

> In the past word processors (if you remembered that far back) use
> formating commands then people could only see the final product when
> they print-previewed.

I know many people who would even today prefer to edit a large
document using Latex instead of OpenOffice ;-)

> I suspect thats where JOSM is at now, will the future (far) be able
> to see real time or instant rendering of there maps?

I don't know what exactly you have installed; there are some plugins
that make JOSM a little bit more WYSIWYG, for example the "mappaint"
plugin or the "osmarender" plugin (the latter works with Firefox and
is more a "print preview" type of thing).

The problem with real WYSIWYG is that there's a lot more to our data
than what you can draw on a map. Like web pages when the first WYSIWYG
web editors came up, OSM sometimes suffers from people giving highest
priority to how something looks on the map and not to the actual data
- believe it or not, there are people who will not hesitate to draw a
little stretch of tram tracks if they find that's the best way to
delineate an otherwise unrendered border. 

So we will have to be careful there. Visual feedback is important, but
our data is not a printed map, and we need our editors to be able to
deal with all the richness beyond that what shows up in rendering.

> Another question is there a way to have more presets in JOSM or do I
> have to somehow manually configure these?

If you try and download the latest version (uploaded by me about two
hours ago) - I've put a number of sensible presets in there. 

Bye
Frederik

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