Dear Experts,
I am completely new to JOSM and I want to generate a map of a small part Manhattan, NY, that displays the streets and street names only (similar to a Google Maps) default image. Can anyone recommend a tutorial or a simple set of instructions for doing this. Would such a map the public domain? In other words could I put it at the beginning of a novel without violating anyone’s copyright?
Best Wishes,
Phil Truscott
You map cannot be in public domain, but you can distribute your map under the same license.
Please refer to the license. http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/en
There are some map examples here http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_OpenStreetMap/Map_examples
The default google map contains much more than road, even if no-one has contributed buildings and businesses in your area.
Unless some third party already has a service for producing such maps, producing them will require a steep learning curve as you will have to install a complex tool chain to render them from the underlying data.
Please remember that the rendered maps provide by OSM itself are tools to help mappers, not part of a general purpose map image production service.