[OSM-talk] Mapnik street name positioning

[Tom Chance]

On Thursday 29 May 2008 17:43:11 David Earl wrote:
> One more thing about Mapnik rendering, then I'll stop!
>
> Quite often streets change their names along their length. But the
> caption placement seems to put the names in the middle of a way.
>
> I wonder if it would be useful instead to put the name at either end of
> the way (unless it won't fit, in which case just one in the centre as
> now), and also repeat at intervals if there is plenty of room. Ditto refs.
>
> Concatenating similarly named contiguous ways and then deciding how to
> do the caption placement as a whole would be better still, but that's
> much harder, of course.

I agree it's a problem and that does sound good, though with Mapnik's 
overlapping avoidance that probably wouldn't work too well. Basically as soon 
as a road ref or some other element rendered first gets in the way the road 
name is left off.

An interim solution, until your idea is developed, might be to put some kind 
of hint like a little line perhaps with arrows at the point where the name 
changes.

It's worth noting that most other maps seem to suffer from this problem too.

Kind regards,
Tom