When vector tiles went onto our main page last year one of the styles, developed by Paul Norman supported by the Foundation through the Engineering Working Group, was based on the Shortbread map display system, which on our front page allows a quick response to the updated database. Shortbread allows multiple map styles and the one we used was a placeholder. @SomeoneElse has produced an alternative and you can look at it at https://vector.openstreetmap.org/demo/.
Let us know what you think of the style. We are considering featuring the style of the front page and if you fancy writing your own style it could also be featured.
I really like the clarity of maps like MapTiler OMT: OpenStreetMap It presents a much ‘cleaner’ map that only shows details at zoom levels where they are meaningful. This compares to the Standard layer, which is like a lossy jpg.
In this view: vector.openstreetmap.org/demo/#15/53.3895340/-6.2504352 whatever about the large font for street names, it seems inappropriate for Ballark Community Training Centre (it is really small), St. Kevin’s Football Club and Eurospar to have similar emphasis.
St. Kevin’s Football Club Way: St. Kevin's Football Club (558672508) | OpenStreetMap - the strong green colour used for leisure=sports_centre makes them look like the most important places in the neighbourhood. I did not understand the pictogram for leisure=sports_centre.
Main roads need to show their names and numbers more.
Golf courses shouldn’t have a stronger colour than public parks.
Private foot paths should be de-emphasised compared to public foot paths.
Mapping car parks with a “P” and a special colour seems too much.
The bus stop pictogram looks ‘odd’ and the use of a double deck bus might not translate for people with little awareness of double deck buses. I can’t understand the u-shaped bus stop pictogram. Bus stops and other public transport stops need to show on more levels.
Blue for a playground seems illogical - blue is for water!
After looking at my local area in this style, all I can say:
The amount of tuning that is visible in OSM Carto, the number of design decisions that went into it, to turn openstreetmap data into a map, must not be underestimated.
I do a lot of landuse mapping and it’s always disappointing to see on vector maps that the map looks almost blank on low zoom levels except for forests.
I do like the colour contrast between grassland and meadow because on Carto it looks like large swathes of the same thing, but perhaps meadow is a bit too pale for me.
I am presuming that this thread is an application of the tile layers guideline, although it doesn’t actually say this anywhere. That guideline was written for an age of raster tiles, and really needs to be revised/rewritten now that we have vector tiles and deploying a new style is just a matter of “add the location of an additional JSON file”. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have dozens or indeed hundreds of new such styles on osm.org, albeit with a revised UI to search/browse through them, and indeed an upload interface so that people can add their own.
FWIW I like this style, it shows some things more clearly, and although it has some infelicities so does every style currently offered on osm.org.
Text labels are too prominent for me. Most visibly, I prefer them mostly contained inside roads, so the font to line ratio should be comparable, smaller texts, or thicker lines or casing. =school are named too early and big at zoom 14 (eg at least the font size should vary by area size to favor usually larger =university and =college ).
The fixed-size route shield boxes are too cramped for 5char / prefixed 4-digit ref= (noticeable in London), and too wide for shorter ones (especially much empty space for single-char). Variable-length is better.
The placeholder style’s rendering order/priority is fine. One could focus on the styling first. Colors is the common complaint.
It’d be nice to know there is something there, and that I need to zoom in further, but without any hint for that maybe I wouldn’t try.
And for some I can’t zoom in any further, their labels are never shown.
And the example isn’t even that complex, most are on the ground floor only. Now if a shopping mall has multiple floors, it’s useless. Either I can’t see any icons and labels, or I’m too zoomed in for any context.
Although one could argue at that point it’d be better to use an indoor map, with layer-selection.
I would like to see that, along with filters for poi, to hode uninteresting ones, and make others more prominant.
Another example of a quite busy spot; it’s hard to make out which line belongs to the same layer, goes on top or below something.
(I know, it’s maybe not the best to start with the most difficult situations, but those stand out the most)
That contains a few map styles for a couple of different schemas; the readme for this map style is here and the actual style itself is here.
Deploying a copy locally for testing is easy (there’s some info in the readme but more can provided if necessary). The readme for the scripts used is here.
The svwd03 vector map style (for Shortbread) is derived from svwd01 (for my own SVE01 schema) which in turn was based on this raster style, which started out as a fork of OSM Carto a dozen years ago.
It was a deliberate decision to use larger names, and also not start with lots of slightly different styles of names (like OSM Carto has). On a small phone screen the standard name size on these maps is “nicely legible” for me whereas this just isn’t. That said, some variation of name type simply just hasn’t been added to this style yet - compare the bus stop and townland names here with here.
Taking bus stops as an example, the part of the file that describes how they should appear is here. "icon-size": { "stops": [ [ 16, 1.0 ], [ 21, 2.0 ] ] }, means “full size icon at vector zoom 16; twice the size at vector zoom 21”.
The source of the icon image is here and the process to create the sprite that the style uses is described here.
MapLibre allows the overlapping of icons and names to be controlled in the style file. Compare here, which has "icon-allow-overlap": true and here which does not. There’s also "text-optional": true that can be set. There’s definitely an argument that could be made for showing amenity=police in preference to some of the other things currently in that layer in the style.
Often the reason why vector styles omit features at low zooms is that they want to keep the size of the vector tiles down at low zooms, so that they load quicker on the client. I’ve done that in a different schema here, and OMT does something similar.
Here I suspect that the problem is indeed the underlying schema - quite a lot of landuse is actually included in the tiles only from vector zoom 11, and if something is not in the tiles, a style can’t show it. The relevant place for issues for things like that is here - you can see that there are already some “a future version of the schema should show X” ones.
Once upon a time I modified the source code of my rambling mobile app. It uses some kind of css. E.g. I changed the colours used to signify sac_scale. I also changed the pedestrian ruleset to dim paths where walking not allowed (some cycleways). The compile cycle and reload in the emulator made this a quite consuming pastime, obviously I had time for that then, but no longer.
I’d appreciate an UI to tweak a style for desktop use with instant feedback. Clicking anywhere in the style by @SomeoneElse linked above I see some # selectors. None of them showing sac_scale nor access. Does that mean, I cannot use those keys in my style?
I’d welcome a feature on the osm main page that would allow me to post an overrides only file, but obviously, a market place of overridable styles has to be there beforehand.
Yes, the Shortbread schema is currently limited to administrative levels 2 and 4 at zoom levels 0 through 7, which precludes city boundaries in the vast majority of countries. This affects the current and proposed styles that would appear in the Shortbread layer on the homepage. On the other hand, the MapTiler OMT layer is based on the OpenMapTiles schema, which does include higher admin levels. So the issue there is probably due to something in the stylesheet, which should hopefully be more straightforward to address.
This style was created from an existing one designed to show things that only occur in England and Wales, so the colours and the icons come from there.
Blue motorways is a design choice inherited from there (echoing originally OSM Carto pre 2014, in turn based on previous maps).
More problematic for an international style is the use of “£” on some icons as a “pay” indicator, and e.g. “M” and “F” to indicate gendered access to some features. The parent style has other “letters for features”; this one may also have some too.
All the icons are in a sprite file, which can be easily loaded into something like gimp to spot international issues, and the individual icons are all in one directory. The source icons are lower resolution raster ones so almost all could benefit with more detailed design for vector.
The process of converting the icons from raster and creating the sprite .png and .json is all in the repository and mentioned in the readme, but perhaps more documentation could help. Other options for that are available (spreet appears to be commonly used); I’m not sure whether the OSMF vector demo sources the sprite files directly or recreates them (either would work).
I have a few issues with the style, mainly primary road is hard to see on a forest background. And The forest tree patterns are too dark, drawing attention away from things that matter more. The colours are pretty good though.
