[OSM-talk] JOSM building bricks

[David Earl]

On 28/09/2007 15:23, Dair Grant wrote:
> Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 
>> It occurred to me that it might be a cool thing to have pre- 
>> fabricated building blocks in JOSM somehow.
> 
> I think this would be very useful - I've found the most time 
> consuming part of residential areas is tidying up the end of streets.
> 
> Although there are a range of shapes used for this (a 
> mini-roundabout around a tree, a circle/square apron of tarmac, 
> an L, a T, a Y, etc), any given area often uses the same pattern 
> over and over again.
> 
> 
> It would be very handy to be able to drag out a standard "end 
> cap" onto a road rather than manually creating 2-3 extra little 
> ways to finish it off.
> 
> Similarly for roundabouts/mini-roundabouts - although these are 
> never a true circle, having a pre-tagged circular shape you 
> could drag out would mean you'd just need to connect it up then 
> distort it to match the true shape.

I was thinking a few weeks back how I could do a JOSM plugin for 
something like this. (If only I had had the time to implement it)

I thought we could have a .osm file which can be loaded as a layer, but 
always centers on the current position (i.e. on load it translates its 
lat/lon to match the current view). This can have samples and common 
features defined any way you like, and be created and modified using 
JOSM in the usual way, standard ones could be made available - they just 
have one extra property applied to them saying they are a proforma.

Then we have copy and paste for selected objects (CTRL/APPLE+C, 
CTRL/APPLE+V of course), which as well as copying the proforma objects 
off the sample layer, means you can replicate anything in the orking 
layers too.

My guess is this wouldn't be too hard to do, compared with writing 
something specific for this functionality.

David