[OSM-talk] Milestone

[Jochen Topf]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 06:08:51PM +0100, Andy Allan wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Steve Chilton <S.L.Chilton at mdx.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> > So, if anyone feels like getting their hands dirty and doing some collaborative work on mapnik style improvements then just drop me a line.
> 
> I've spent quite a while making maps based on the osm.xml file - not
> just the cycle map, but others too - and it's a bit of a pain* to
> maintain a fork or even just use the main one as a base to work from.
> I wonder if making this easier will build more of a community around
> the mapnik stylesheet and therefore get more things fed back in.
> 
> So what does everyone think about raising the minimum requirements to
> mapnik + libxml xmparser support**? For the basics, that would allow
> defining all the colours in one place at the top of the file (and only
> use each hex code once***). Most of what I've seen people wanting to
> do is fiddle with the colours and it's currently pretty hard to do,
> and a pain to keep in sync.
> 
> Beyond that, we could look at splitting layers into separate files,
> again for ease of following changes since diffs of large repetitive
> files can be erratic (and editing too, I would suspect, since I often
> lose track of whether I'm in the middle of a roads-casing or
> minor-roads-fill stylename).
> 
> Thoughts?

Sure, the entities would make things somewhat easier. But the XML is still
horribly to work on. Steve gets all my sympathy :-). (btw: in case you
haven't seen this, I created a XSL style file to turn Mapnik XML into
HTML. See http://geo.topf.org/mapnik/osm.xml for an example. Makes
working with large Mapnik map files somewhat easier.)

But I'd rather have a GUI editor. Artem started on one but it seems its
more or less abandoned now. Steve Coast showed one slide at SOTM with
something that looked like a Mapnik style editor or similar. I meant to
ask for details but forgot. Is there something coming up there?

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298