[OSM-talk] JOSM interface direction

[Ulf Lamping]

Frederik Ramm schrieb:
>> 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 ;-)
>   
Yes, some people still live in the past. ;-)
>> 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. 
>   
Both mappaint and tagging presets are going exactly into the direction 
of WYSIWYG editing - which I still think is the way to go as it's so 
much faster to work with (not only for newbies) if it's done well (there 
are some things that needs to be improved to make it that way).

Now I understand what problems some people have with mappaint (beside 
the problems it still has) and tagging presets - they just don't like 
WYSIWYG.

Regards, ULFL