Best way to highlight a route on a paper map

Seventy7 · 2009-07-30T16:55:33.000Z

I’m thinking of redoing some of the local Tourist Board’s short cycle route maps and was wondering the best way to do it.

Should I create a relation for each of the routes and render them in Kosmos (i.e. store the route in OSM) or should I export the map and highlight the routes afterwards using some graphics program?

Thanks,
Steve

Vclaw · 2009-07-30T17:42:51.000Z

Are these ‘official’ cycle routes? Are they signposted or marked on the ground in anyway?
Or is the only way of following them to use the tourist board’s map?

One of the main ‘rules’ of OSM is “map what’s on the ground”, so unless they are actually signposted I don’t think they should be added to OSM. As there is no way of verifying where the route actually goes.

Also, there may be copyright issues if copying these routes from another map. Do you have appropriate permission from the tourist board?

Even if they are not in the main OSM DB, its still possible to render them in Kosmos. eg you can add them as a GPX file.

Seventy7 · 2009-07-30T18:15:21.000Z

No they are all unofficial, although I could probably get permission if I needed to.

How would I create a GPX file (other than tracing the route) and render it in Kosmos? Although I’m finally getting somewhere with it, Kosmos is still a bit of a mystery!

Edited to Add: Just thought, isn’t what I’ve asked for the same as for a bus route? They are mapped in OSM.

Vclaw · 2009-07-31T18:41:54.000Z

Seventy7:

How would I create a GPX file (other than tracing the route) and render it in Kosmos? Although I’m finally getting somewhere with it, Kosmos is still a bit of a mystery!

You can create the GPX is JOSM:
Select all of the ways that are part of the route, splitting and combining them if necessary.
Then copy the ways, create a new layer, then paste it in. You can then save this layer as a GPX file or an OSM file etc. (Just don’t upload this layer to OSM, because it will mess things up!).

There may be better ways of doing this using other software, I’m not sure.

Then in Kosmos, there’s a box in the top left for Project Explorer. Right click on where it says “GPX files”, and choose “Add files”. I’m not sure if there’s anyway to change how Kosmos renders the GPX on the map?

Maybe a better way would be to change the tagging of the way in JOSM, before saving as an OSM file. eg if you tagged the whole way as highway=mycycleroute, then you can create a rendering rule in Kosmos to draw that in a particular way.

Edited to Add: Just thought, isn’t what I’ve asked for the same as for a bus route? They are mapped in OSM.

There was some discussion of this on the talk-gb list recently, see http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2009-July/thread.html#4245.
I think the conclusion is bus routes are verifiable, as you can get on the number 42 bus and see where it goes, or follow it. Plus they are often signposted at stops etc.
But there isn’t anyway of verifying ‘unofficial’/unmarked cycle routes (except by copying other maps).

Alex_McKee · 2009-08-02T05:39:37.000Z

A bit of an aside: If the route is widely known and acknowledged to exist, but perhaps isn’t officially recognised, I still think it is fine to add it to OSM. A long distance path in Gloucestershire is currently being mapped (not by me) which is not an official LDP but it is certainly one I know about and obviously other contributors do as well.

A network tag (on route relations) allows people to style official routes differently.

Vclaw, that’s a nice detailed description of how to overlay custom route information in Kosmos. That’ll come in handy.