[OSM-talk] Good practices violated?

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 30 May 2013, Jakub wrote:
>
> PS: I beleive that this problem is much more general, it is also true
> with all sorts of regions, cities and villages. Names are rendered
> two or three times and is not good at all.

This is also common for islands and in some form also for seas/oceans 
(where there is no geometry at all except for the labeling node).

The underlying reason is in part that normal rendering has to be done 
directly from the database in real time and this does not allow for any 
more expensive computations for label placement.  Toby described this 
in more detail.

Somewhat related is the problem of label placement by the renderer with 
overlapping labels of different type and suboptimal priorities in 
selection of labels.

The only solution to this seems to be to introduce a preprocessing step 
generating the labeling information from the map data that is not done 
in real time and therefore can be more expensive.  There is one other 
place where this is already done in OSM, that is the coastlines and as 
many are painfully aware this is not working particularly well (current 
coastline on osm.org is nearly four months old).

Greetings,

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/