[OSM-talk] mapnik style updates

[Steve Chilton]

This week's mapnik style updates (actually 2 weeks rolled into one, but we won't go into that) included resolving 10 minor tweaks that had been noted in trac.
It also included 2 un-trac'd ones, one of which I had meant to address for a while and another which I had never got around to addressing until someone mentioned it.
Firstly I have applied the "spacing" command to the unclassified and residential highway tags at high zooms. This has the effect of taking the name for a long road and repeating it at intervals, thus removing the need for splitting ways to tag names for rendering. The effect can maybe best be seen in the grid pattern roads to the east of New York's Central Park, where previously you could have a road with no name showing as it was long and (correctly) only named once.
Secondly each level of the place tag has it's own layer in the painting heirarchy, and they are rendered sequentially rather than in the order brought from the database. It meant that important place names could sometimes be not shown because of mapnik's fairly random collision avoidance rules, for instance a road ref shield could take preference over a city name). Hopefully place name rendering will be improved by this change.
 
Cheers
STEVE