[OSM-talk] short forms of street names

Inge Wallin inge at lysator.liu.se
Tue Jun 24 13:54:00 BST 2008


In some places the streets are very short.  This makes it difficult to show 
the name of the street in full.  However, for most street names there exist a 
short form. In swedish most names are of the form Foogatan (Foo street) or 
Barvägen (Bar road).  These are often shortened to Foog. or Barv. in 
commercial maps.

It would be nice if we could tag this in OSM with something like:

 name=Foovägen
 name:sh=Foov (or name:short)

*and* that the renderers would take this into account where it is applicable.  
The whole scheme is irrelevant if the renderers don't use it.

An alternative would be that the renderers have a table of common 
abbreviations like:

  road: rd
  street: str
  vägen: v (swedish)
  gatan: g (swedish)
  Straße: str (german)
...etc

Is this feasible or will it remain just a pipe dream? I find that always using 
the long names make the maps more difficult to use in practice.

	-Inge




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