[OSM-talk] Survey: Bad Map Rendering

[Tom Chance]

Hi,

On Friday 21 March 2008 11:23:57 Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I'm sure each of you must have some "pet peeve" with our map
> rendering, some area you have mapped but which never looks right, some
> place where you're always tempted to edit the map tile with the GIMP
> before uploading it ;-)
>
> I'd be happy to hear from you about such "areas of bad rendering",
> whether they are bugs in there renderer(s) or just things that are
> ugly for some reason.

First, the range of greens used by Mapnik! It's great to differentiate, but I 
don't think we've yet cracked the balance between this and making it clear. 
The map key is pretty revealing - you need good eyesight to find the 
corresponding shade. It's not just greens, either - we use lots of area 
shades, which is attractive and useful once you know what they mean but with 
so many shades it's very confusing.

Second, label placement again, but specifically getting more of them into a 
space. Mapnik uses a pretty primitive collision system, so whilst there is 
often loads of space to squeeze in names they get left out. A human would 
have no problem labelling all of the amenities on this map view, for example:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.38&lon=-0.1544&zoom=16

Often road names are placed in the middle of a way, cutting out a pub name 
when the road name could just be placed a little further along. Or a road ref 
stops a place name rendering, which again just needs to be moved around a bit 
to fit in -- place names aren't so precise that a 100m correction at zoom 
level 14/15 will matter that much.

Other maps like A-Z seem much better at labelling everything.

Kind regards,
Tom