[OSM-talk] Recent changes to slippymap Mapnik rendering

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Wed Oct 29 17:13:04 GMT 2008


On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 3:52 PM, David Ebling <dave_ebling at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

It's helpful up to a point, but there's a certain amount of "art" to
cartography, and things can be changed without being technically
better or worse, just different. And in much of this I'm quite happy
to defer to Steve Chilton, what with him being a professional and all
of us (myself included) being new to the game.

> -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.
> -Road widths at z=17 seem too wide relative to other zoom levels.

I disagree, but these are all judgement calls.

> -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.
> -Train stations were better in red than blue, as they stood out better. Again, I find the new colour too pale.

I agree, but again these are judgement calls.

> -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.

Actually a technical issue, so this time not a judgement call :-) This
is the only thing which isn't really an opinion!

> I would go ahead and make what I think are improvements myself, but I don't know anything about tweaking rendering styles.

I'd encourage you to learn - it takes a while, but it's not
insurmountable. I know from experience that it takes a lot of effort
to make OSM stylesheets, but more hands to the pump are welcome. All
the instructions needed for setting up a test mapnik server are on the
wiki (if they aren't, I'll fix them), and you can put some of your
suggestions into practice and see what they look like. Discussions
such as yours are even more valuable if they are accompanied by
screenshots and diffs.

Cheers,
Andy




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