[OSM-talk] OSM rewriting history : France is now part of Germany !

[John Smith]

2010/1/3 Patrick Kilian <osm at petschge.de>:
> Does anybody here know a reasonably fast algorithm which finds the
> center of the (largest) incircle of a polygon? And would you find that a
> suitable stop for the label of the polygon?
> I tried to play around with that idea but couldn't come up with an
> algorithm to find that point efficiently in the general case.
> Furthermore I'm not totally sure if it really is the optimal place for
> the label as the label itself is not circular but much wider then the
> vertical extend.

In the case of suburb polygons in Australia, even if you do figure out
a better way to centre the label the "centre" of the polygon isn't
always the town centre.

Cartography is an art form, and you will never be able to do this sort
of thing perfectly by extrapolation from the boundary.