[OSM-talk] Simplifying shapes

[Erik Johansson]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>> I want to
>> simplify the outline to make the files smaller and to make drawing quicker
>> (I have many of these shapes to use in an OpenLayers vector layer),
>
> I didn't know that OpenLayers supported OSM files natively?

It's fast and extensively used on osm.org in the data tab and to
browse ways/data:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/55462864

There is a simple algo[1] for to simplify polygons, if you want a
ready made tool maybe you can use boundaries.pl or something similar
e.g. serve from postgis,

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Boundaries.pl
http://bostongis.org/PrinterFriendly.aspx?content_name=postgis_simplify


[1] Douglas-Peucker algorithm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramer–Douglas–Peucker_algorithm
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/emj