A short name that does not appear at any zoom level

Hi,

The name of Parc Jacob Kaplan does not appear at any zoom level, even though the name is quite short: OpenStreetMap

Is this a bug or is there anything missing?

The two cycle map styles actually do show the name. So, the data is OK. It’s up to the renderer to decide whethere there is enough space to show the name or not. The “standard” style called “Carto” seems to not show it.

I think this is just label collision.
Carto can’t find a good place for the label near the middle of the park, without blocking other stuff. In this case, I think those playgrounds have taken priority.

Other maps with different label priorities may find some space.

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At zoom level 19, there is space. I would see this as a bug.

Moreover, shouldn’t the playgrounds have a lower priority (like the trees)?

I don’t think there is. Have a look at a different layer where the label does appear.

Normally the flippant answer to that is “pull requests welcome”. In the case of the “OSM Carto” style I’m not sure I can really say that. It;s actually quite a hard problem to solve since it’s fundamentally about priority, and the users of a general map style will have different priorities.

I’d welcome someone looking at this in more detail, and not just in mapnik based styles - but be warned that it’s far from straightforward.

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Had that finding some months ago, in the end a true collision of the administrative center of a large community boundary and that of a 500 km square national park, both labels happening to center on the same spot. Carto would not render the park label but others would whose render priority was set on different objects. Not even adding the park admin center (just few hundred meters away from the community admin center caused it to budge as that is not where park names are rendered. They would just overlap and that’s not what any seem to allow.

There is space anywhere in one of the black rectangles (this is at zoom 19).

There is no space currently at the centre, but arguable playgrounds having more priority than the name of the park, across all zoomlevels, seems to be an improvable decision, because playgrounds often happen to be in parks, so this will lead to many park names never shown.

Looking around, I think it currently mostly works, because of the center kept free, if rendering of parknames should be enforced more, the priority could be above icon layers up to zoom18, and only at z19 show the icons if they otherwise would clash.
but I noticed a similar issue, where a bigger park is labeled incompletely: Relation: ‪Ernst-Thälmann-Park‬ (‪14395502‬) | OpenStreetMap

OSM Carto (or any other cartocss-based map style) tells mapnik where to place labels.
Someone (perhaps you?) would need to make a pull request to the mapnik source code to make use of that space. They’d also then need to make a similar change to OSM Carto to apply the new method.

However, as I said above, a change to mapnik is far from straightforward. Maybe you could start by investigating the layers in which these things are shown, and the placement options that mapnik already allows?

The main issue might not be due to playgrounds only. For instance, there is the same issue for “Parc Sergent Blandan” (for zoom levels 18 and 19), which has no playgrounds around the center. The name of the park is visible on the cycle map (layers=C), but not on the standard map, while there are only trees. But the label appears at zoom level 17, so perhaps this is a different issue here, though I don’t see any reason.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how all these things work internally.

It’s not - in my Mapnik-based style I see it in all sorts of places (far more than OSM Carto, actually!)

Well, there’s only one person here who can change that :slight_smile:

More seriously, it’s a hard problem to solve (see above) - it’s essentially “Can we have everything louder than everything else?”**

** famously said by someone in a very different context.