newbie guestion/comment: Annoying boundaries in Garmin

General talk
1

Lambertus and many others are doing great work helping the rest of us.
There is just one thing I don’t like about the default style of his maps:

Even the least important administrative boundaries show annoyingly in Garmin units, making it difficult to read which is the town boundary and which one is the road/path.

In some regions of the world there are (too)hard working mappers who have marked every single rural municipality boundary. I don’t think every “level 8” boundary should be made visible in the small gps screen. roads and paths, shorelines etc. are much more important to the average user.

Also POI’s are often visible in way too small zoom levels, making it difficult to see other map information like streed names. Regardless or the gps unit settings.

How can a OSM-n00b like me make my own map with my own settings? I have done some mapping in my home region, so I have used Potlatch and JOSM. The rest of the process is complete new to me.

Following written directions of the wiki is fine with me, but the most difficult is to know how to make the appropriate changes to get the result I want.

I am using WinXP.

Thanks in advance,

Paavo N
bicyclist, sailor, photographer and geocacher (among other things)
Mikkeli, Finland

2

There’s a bunch of information on my website about this.

3

Hmm, I thought those boundaries got filtered-out during preprocessing. Will check again later.

Edit: No they were not. But I added admin_level=8 to 10 to the ways that should be rejected during preprocessing. I hope it works well for the next update.

4

You can try installing a TYP file:
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=10032

It doesn’t solve all problems (a lot is hard coded in the mkgmap default styles) but you can change a bit of the poi symbols, display of the line and polygon elements etc by editing the TYP file.

5

As mentioned above, you need to change the linewidth or pattern/colour of the ‘boundary’ polyline so it doesn’t appear like a track - I’ve had the same problem in the past , hiking across Europe. Use the mapnik typ , as it caters for various boundaries ;it does however need some tweaking . You can load the typ file into Typ Wiz and quickly make the necessary changes.

www.pinns.co.uk/osm