[OSM-talk] short forms of street names

[Andy Allan]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Inge Wallin <inge at lysator.liu.se> wrote:
> 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

I think the rendering decisions should be left up to the renderers,
where possible, rather than adding extra tags. It's not inconceivable,
for example, for the length of the displayed road to be calculated and
the name shortened where possible using a lookup table as you suggest.

Cheers,
Andy