[OSM-talk] recent changes in rendering the map make it worse

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/09/2015 11:53, joost schouppe wrote:
> ... I don't know how we could expect OSM-carto to reflect all our 
> needs. Apart from being a tool for mappers (i.e. showing as much as 
> possible), it also wants to be pretty and useful for non-mappers. 
> Trying to make everyone happy might make everyone unhappy in the end.

I completely agree with that. 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CARTOGRAPHY.md 
sums up what it's trying to do, and to be fair that does say that the 
three main aims "pull in different directions".  For comparison I 
recently had a look at the OSM map style as it was in April 2014, and 
personally I'm not convinced that progress has been made in two of the 
three areas mentioned as goals (specfically detail's less visible, the 
design _is_ clearer (as in more coherent) and it's not any easier to 
customise).

>
> If you want to make people who need paths happy, just send them to 
> waymarkedtrails.org <http://waymarkedtrails.org> or to opentopomap.org 
> <http://opentopomap.org> . And if that doesn't make you happy, use 
> overpass-turbo (e.g. http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/bCm) to highlight the 
> features you need. And show them in a pretty map with umap (see 
> http://www.mappa-mercia.org/2014/09/creating-an-always-up-to-date-map.html 
> for instructions).
> (Yes, the performance of umap/overpass combo isn't great, that could 
> really use some improvement. And yes, it would be nice if osm.org 
> <http://osm.org> was more of a portal for all of us special needs people)

To add to that, creating "a personal map style" of a small area using 
https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-14-04/ 
whilst not for everyone, isn't that difficult these days, and it doesn't 
require huge server resources.  There are also canned options such as 
Mapbox of course if you want someone to host it for you.  It'd be nice 
if there was a way to see the tiles on osm.org without resorting to 
cludges such as 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:SomeoneElse/Your_tiles_from_osm.org 
though.

Cheers

Andy (SomeoneElse)

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