However, doing the instructions as written, it leads to error messages and doesn’t work:
In ID: once the “school node” is part of the area (i.e. its corner), it can’t be merged anymore with the following message “These objects can’t be merged.”
In JOSM: “Node belongs to way(s), cannot replace”
How would this be properly done? And can we update the page, it is definitely unclear, even if I didn’t get it.
Example: node to area
(school node to campus area outline):
Move the school node to a corner of the aerial image.
Draw the campus area with this node as one of the corners.
Copy the tags from the node and delete all its tags.
iD users can select the area and the node and press C to merge the node data with the area.
JOSM users with the utilsplugin2 plugin can use Ctrl+⇧ Shift+G to do the same.
I think step 1 is just saying to scoot the node out of the way so you can draw the building area (or campus area) independently of it. After you draw the area, you can merge the node with it. iD takes care of step 4 automatically.
If you happened to drag the node onto the area, combining it with a vertex, you’d have to use the Extract function before recombining it with the area. In that case, it might be easier to just transfer the tags from the vertex to the area. You can expand the Tags section of the sidebar and switch it to text mode to cut and paste the tags.
Step 2 is quite clearly contradicting this with “this node” should be used as one of the corners of the area.
Anway, not using the node and merging it later is also something I tried, but that does not preserve the history. At least in iD, the area is shown as “w-1 no history (new object)”.
I’ll try with some test objects to test if that’s just the editor view and report back.
Ah, that is confusing. Maybe the sub-bullet points about merging have nothing to do with the rest of the steps after all. We could pull them out into a separate passage as an alternative to the list of steps.
iD reuses the node as the northwesternmost vertex of the area, as long as the way’s vertex is new and the node was already there before your editing session. Sometimes when I spot an incorrectly merged area – like a restaurant merged with a building despite another tenant inside the building – I’ll manually move the tags back onto the vertex before extracting it, to preserve and restore the history.
Yes, thats the right idea. Considering you seem to understand this flow in iD better, would you maybe like to rewrite it?
Another useful information:
I think the JOSM plugin does it the same way, there’s also one node that is in the corner (bottom right for the example triangle): Node History: 14087817682 | OpenStreetMap
I am going to delete those objects again now, thank you for the help.