[OSM-talk] OSM support in RoadMap

[Paul Fox]

hi --

just a note to say that OSM support in RoadMap is stabilizing. 
roadmap started life as strictly a TIGER renderer.  it grew some
shapefile input processors over the years, and now it can handle
input from OSM.

there are a few screenshots here -- the first two are different
perspectives on central dublin, and the third is a much larger
scale view of that area of the UK.
    http://roadmap.sourceforge.net/temp/osmindex.html
please be kind -- remember that the rendering is done on the
displaying host, which can be as small as a PDA, not on big iron
somewhere else.

the OSM support is only in CVS currently, and map building is
still a manual (though simple) process which takes place external
to the roadmap program.  (this will be changing soon.)  there are
some other new features in the works for roadmap as well, which
i'd like to clean up for the next tarball release, but if you're
comfortable with CVS, then by all means, give roadmap a try with
OSM data.  (note that the CVS code is still backward compatible
with the pre-built demo and US/Canada maps referenced from the
roadmap website, if you're interested in using those as well.)

the roadmap vector data (built from OSM) for the entire UK comes
in at roughly 50MB.  the data is a subset of what's fully
availble from OSM, mainly matching what roadmap currently
displays for TIGER input data -- roads/lakes/rivers/parks/railroads.
extending it for cycleways, or whatever, would be
straightforward.  also, due to a long-standing limitation in
roadmap, there are no nodes in the data -- roadmap only currently
does ways and polygons (areas).  (this missing functionality is
slowly rising to the top of the to-do list.  to be clear --
custom points-of-interest files can currently be overlaid on the
roadmap rendering -- it's just that the nodes are part of the
base map data.)

roadmap is available from http://roadmap.sourceforge.net.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 24.1 degrees)