[Tilesathome] Lowzoom approaches. Feedback appreciated.

[spaetz]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 07:56:11AM -0700, Alan Millar wrote:
> I think this is OK to do.  I see it as a short-term fix until we get
> choice 2 working.  I think I have done most of the z8 generating lately. 
> I probably will not bother adapting my local scripts and tile lists to z6,
> but spend my time figuring out choice number 2:
> 
> >> 2) Live with the suboptimal lowzoom stitching until I have fixed up
> >> things and found better ways to create nice looking low zoom tiles and
> >> to combine them with the caption layer. This could easily take a week
> >> or 2.
> 
> I think this is OK.  Either way it should not be too long until the
> server-side stitching is fixed.  We lived with messy lowzoom layers for
> months; another week or two probably won't hurt anything.

I had a good look at the cairo docs and although they are good with vector stuff, they don't seem particularly advanced on image manipulation. As our use of cairo was pretty primitive anyway, I think I'll have a look at replacing that with the Python Image Library (PIL) which works similarly but has much more image manipulation possibilities. I only used cairo as that happened to be installed on the server while PIL is not (yet).
Allan, do you want to have a go at it? I can always try to answer/help. If you won't I will have a look at it after the server settled down enough for me to get to my priority 'B' list.

> I don't think the client should do everything, but I think the client
> should do the caption layer.

Absolutely, the server has no intention :-) to create these by itself. Adding the caption layer styles and configuration to client would be good. You can upload these z6-11 tilesets already now (make the stylesheet for z6 and z7 empty?). People can do that unsolicited, or we can try to make the client accept requests for a lowzoom caption. Then the server could issue those.

spaetz