POTW: Icons for Renders

Hi, Im not sure if everybody recognized this ‘project of the week’ we try to created missing icons for the renderers.
Would be nice if the render dev crews pai attention on this :slight_smile:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/2010/Jul_25

Well does anybody know where the Mapnik SVG icons are stored? Or how manage the graphic part of this renderer?

Mapnik doesn’t (yet) use SVG icons. Only the PNG icons you see in the svn directory.

However, many of the mapnik icons are drawn from Brian Quinion’s collection. It would be great when the contributions from your POTW would fall under the same CC0 or comparable license so they can be added to this collection.

Yes we try to promote this license.

Welll oooooooooooooooookkkkkkkkkkkkk there seem to be everything?!? So god damn why do I make this competition? :frowning:

BTW Can anybody tell me who is responsible for the OSM mapnik setup and therefore for adding new icons? A mail to the dev list remained unanswered :confused:

The actual server (yevaud) is setup and maintained by the OSM admin team, whereas Jon Burgess is responsible for checking updates before deploying them.

Maintenance/development of the stylesheet is mostly done by Steve Chilton (steve8) and me. I usually do more technical maintenance, while Steve does more cartographic/stylistic development. Symbols aren’t added nilly willy, as you can see from the large list at that site and the amount that actually appear on the map. This isn’t the default osmarender map where they try to cram everything and their granny into the tiles, you see. :slight_smile:

Well right but the only reason people have to switch to osmarender is cause it displays items that Mapnik don’t have.

And there is a plenty of usefull features that should be displayed in the right style e.g. car_shop, butcher,…

I will try to get in contact with Steve, thank you very much :slight_smile:

You have to understand that part of the choices one has to make in designing a map is when to not show certain features. There is no way that the OSM ‘mapnik’ map will ever show everything that mappers come up with.

For example, with the shops, a conscious decision was made to start with the 5 to 10 major (amount, importance) shop types, and see what that looks like on the map, especially in dense areas.

Yes I absolutely agree with your point. But there are different reasons I decided for this competition and why in my opinion we lack of a few features:

  1. logical inconsistence:
    Why do we show icons and we doesn’t show relatives e.g. when bakery why not butcher?

  2. Missing important icons:
    We doesn’t show up very important icons e.g. car_shop and they aren’t show up in the shop graphic style

  3. Not visible to external endusers
    If you are not familiar with editing OSM, you think what you see on the map is ‘all’. More over most people expect Mapnik is the only map so it has to be representative. This results in some useless OpenStreetBugs entry :frowning:

  4. featured that are mostly isolated
    Well there are items that are good to know and wouldn’t clutter the map. e.g. a crematory is only on a graveyard where aren’t that much objects in this area and in this case a crematory is a central POI.

5.color encodnig is not significant
We have problems to distinguish between different subtypes of the same object class e.g. sportfields where it is currently impossible to know what it is for.

Full ack osmarender goes the wrong way and we have to pay attention that we doesn’t get to unbalanced. But anyway we have to understand that this is ‘the map’ we have to mark sure that we represent the state of our project. Of course I doesn’t wan’t to tell the people how they have to do their job, this is just my opinion and what I recognized by other users and consumers.

IMHO the best solution would be a second layer (maybe with the help of osmarender?) that renders the same style as mapnik but is trimmed for displaying the most items.

What do you think about this arguments Ldp?

Hold on, hold on. Not everyone spends every waking minute on OSM or the forum! :slight_smile:

As I mentioned, we started with the most common shop types in OSM. Butcher was not one of them, at the time. We could have probably added a few more since, but haven’t done so yet.

One person’s important icon is another person’s unimportant icon. You mentioned car_shop a few times, so it would seem it’s important to you. Others could deem a bike shop to be more important, or no shop at all. There’s been a recent trac request for car shop rendering. As I think most of those are not usually located in a dense retail area, there should not be too much of a problem in adding these.

You might think the map you see is all there is, but with the pluriform tagging that OSM has, it can never ever be that. We can only aspire to show the most common elements, that make the most sense on a generic map. Hence the existence of several specialty maps dealing with bicycle/walking routes, water features, etc.

See my closing argument for 2.

sport=* is like shop=. There are a lot of different types around, but the first question is "do we want to show sport= types as a symbol" and for the answer to that we’d better defer to Steve. As you can see from SJJB’s page, a lot of sport symbols are already there.

There is nothing or nobody stopping you from creating a map that looks like the generic ‘mapnik’ map, but showing every type of symbol you can think of. At least as long as they don’t overlap and one is dropped. Or even overlapping symbols and/or texts, if you so want.

Sry Ldp, wasn’t sure if I missed the right tone :confused:
I know it’s hard to take choices, so don’t think I wan’t to blame you or something like this :slight_smile:

So might it possible to add new ones? Might it be possible to add ones referencing this POTW?

  1. Absolutely but there are more interesting ones like e.g. shop=car
    But what about making a vote let’s say to add 5 more icons, on the whole community and what they say is important to them?

  2. Yes, good aspect but nobody who’s not familar with OSM knows about it. He just looks at to Google maps and tries to compare (and later to use/consume OSM, of course) :wink:

Yes you are right, but why to fork? I just try to improve things that I know a lot of people think they are annoying. But BTW what about a dev server to test how dense your style would become with the icons? Might be the problem isn’t that big as we think? e.g. shops have smaller font’s, easier classification cause of colours of the new objects,…?

As I said I think we have to provide a high res map (with reduced common details like roadnames,…) that show up the most common features as a second layer, otherwise nobody will be satisfied. But this is just IMHO. The current osmarender shocks people but they have to use it if they would like to see more features :frowning:

Hi, so is there a usual way to vote for new icons? Would it make sense to open a trac ticket? Is it allowed to request more than one new icon?

For the info of all: such a trac ticket has now been opened bij !¡!.

Yes it’s here: http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/3156

Sorry no answer, so what can we do?

Heh, I had actually already expected that question. :slight_smile:

Exercise some patience. There are a lot of requests for the renderers, and those made for the mapnik based default map are not always honoured and those that do can be around for some time before they are implemented.

ok no problem, I stay tuned Ldp :slight_smile:

Hi, some people asked me what will happen, if there is a timeline… So do you have any plans for the ‘adding more icons’ process?

I was one of the persons inquiring and I am also interested what happens now with the new icons.