[OSM-talk] Recent changes to slippymap Mapnik rendering

[Dave Stubbs]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 3:52 PM, David Ebling <dave_ebling at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I've noticed a lot of changes to the Mapnik slippymap rendering lately, and IMHO they are mainly not improvements.
>
> As the appearance of this map layer has a large impact on the public face of OSM, I think it's important to have lots of people discuss their views on this.
>
> Personally I don't like many of the recent changes because:
>
> -Everything's in pastel shades. Bold colours are clearer and look better.
> -Primary, trunk and secondary roads have no casing on them. This makes road junctions into a big mess, and you can't see what's what at all.
> -New icons are a bit pale. I think the old ones looked better. Although I can see reasons for making them smaller, I don't think they are as clear.
> -The road refs aren't centred properly in their boxes. This looks really poor. Also, they aren't as clear as the used to be.
> -Train stations were better in red than blue, as they stood out better. Again, I find the new colour too pale.
> -Road widths at z=17 seem too wide relative to other zoom levels.
>
> I appreciate the effort people are putting into trying to make the map look as good as possible, but I think we need more opinion input and discussion on what looks best.
>
> I'm really looking to spark discussion here, rather than be critical, though unfortunately all of my comments happen to be negative.
>

Here are some positives (they're not that hard to find):
 - Colour scheme is now much more consistent
 - Icons are all the same size and style, and cover more POI types
 - POIs are carefully introduced to avoid clutter at lower zoom levels
 - The new styles emphasise main roads above other features much less
-- OSM is about more than mapping main roads and the new styles serve
to highlight the detail instead of the traditional dominant features.
 - Related to above, cycleways, footways, bridle paths are now much
clearer relative to other features
 - Bridges are much clearer

Dave