[OSM-talk] tagging and rendering highways in the USA and elsewhere

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Apr 18 19:10:29 BST 2008


Hi,

> Who decides what colours are used on the main maps? I.e. who actually 
> decided that motorways should be blue, and trunks should be green, how 
> railways are rendered etc.?
> 
> Say I'd like to see railways rendered differently in the t at h maps, where 
> should I ask? Is there some "formal" process like for accepting new 
> tags where general agreement is formed?

The t at h maps are computed based on stylesheets that are in SVN, so
anybody can change them. It usually takes a while until a change is
visible everywhere because (1) not all tiles are rendered anew after a
style change, and (2) not all renderers update their styles every day.

We don't have a formal process to decide nor are there written rules.
The unwritten rules are probably roughly:

1. Don't break the styles
2. If you add something that affects only a small number of tiles,
   say because you started to tag historic battle sites and want a
   little marker there at the highest zoom level, just do it - if 
   people are unhappy, they can still change it and re-render
3. If you want to change something big, then discuss it on the t at h
   list. It's no use pushing through a change that would lead to
   half of the renderers simply refusing to update ;-)
4. Big changes like a different colour for highways are a bit 
   difficult since very many tiles have to be rendered, and the map
   will be a patchwork of old and new tiles for quite a while.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"





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