[OSM-talk] short forms of street names

["Marc Schütz"]

> 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)
> 

name:sh is not a good idea, because there could be a language whose code is "sh". How about short_name? This could also be localised like short_name:en, short_name:sv etc.

I'm already using short_name for abbreviations of building names on the Bayreuth university campus.

> *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
> 

Regards, Marc

-- 
Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen! 
Ideal für Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer