[OSM-talk] short forms of street names

[Karl Newman]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 3:37 AM, Robin Paulson <robin.paulson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 2008/6/25 wer-ist-roger <juwelier-online at web.de>:
> > I don't like the idea of the short_name tag for common names. The
> rendering
> > engine should be configured to shorten abbreviations like road, street,
> > vägen, gatan, Straße or what ever by itself. This is much more sufficient
> > then adding the tags one by one. That gives everyone the chance to choose
> for
> > them selfs if they like to shorten a name or not. This is especially
> > important when you can shorten more then one thing in one name. For
> example
> > Sankt Ingbert Straße could be shortened:
> ......
> >
> > I believe that the rendering engine should be responsible for shorting
> names
>
> i think he was referring to the bits that can't be shortened
> automatically, for instance shortening "Karangahape Road" (in
> auckland) to "K' Road" as it's also known
>
> or shortening "Durham" of "Durham Lane East" (also akl) to "Dur"
> (because the street's very short, and we can't fit all the full name
> in) by hand, and letting software rules shorten Lane to Ln and East to
> E.
>

The other problem is that shortening rules which work for one street (or
region) won't necessarily work in another. As "wer-ist-roger" mentioned,
Straße could be shortened to Str., which might be okay in some areas (or for
certain streets) but not for others. Without a hint, the renderers (or other
data consumers) won't know if a given shortening rule is okay to apply.

Karl
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