I have a question about creating custom road shields, and I know this ties into
-carto - but I think it needs tags to work, so I’ll start here in the tagging
list.
I was thinking of a method for adding custom badges or shields to roads and
generic objects - usually country specific things, such as the icons for types
of roads, the icons for a police station, etc. This could be used for business
icons, but I assume there is some kind of legal and rendering mess for that, so
I’m not talking about businesses - just road shields, “emergency”-like icons,
etc.
if we come up with a tagging solution that refers to a specific shield, then it
should be easy for badging to be implemented in -carto and other mapping
software, right?
Roads:
badge:japan=national_road
badge:japan=prefectural_road
badge:japan=tollway
badge:usa=interstate
Different standards in regions of countries could be easily implemented as
well, along with custom official road tags (like California’s “scenic highway
designation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Scenic_Highway_System_(California)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Scenic_Highway_System_(California)> )
(California Scenic highway sign for state roads) = usa-ca-sr-state
By following an easy format badge:country-region-county-city. I doubt there
will be *categories* of roads lower than the county level, but you never know.
badge:usa-ca=highway
badge:usa-ca-sr=state
badge:usa-ca-sandiego=county_road
Buildings:
badge:japan=police
This might also work for custom renderings of country specific ways. For
example, the Shinkansen system is always traditionally rendered with a black
and white striped line that has longer segments than the normal B&W striped
lines used for the normal national system train lines system (often ~50%
longer). Other train lines are rendered with solid black/dark grey lines. this
is a common way of differentiating the lines, as the stations on the lines are
the major relative navigational landmarks of Japan (since street names and
“street numbers” are virtually non-existant).
Even most unofficial maps usually follow these guidelines as well, as this one
shows.
(the shinkansen is striped, but it green on this map, the B&W is the national
JR system, and solid colors are the different “private” lines - thin for
subway, thick for above-ground)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xUSQcEJEcJ0/UHkSfU7qEPI/AAAAAAAAPyU/fdAZDbuGTxk/s1600/tokyo+total+train+map.png
But currently there is no way to dictate what should be shown, and standard b&w
rendering in -carto is incorrect for Japan.
badge:japan=shinknsen
badge:japan=jr_line
badge:japan=private_rail
Maybe this could be done with the colour=* tag [colour=long_bw] but colour is
currently ignored, AFAIK.
The uniformity of country to country rendering in -carto because of the lack of
a system for taggers to designate which badges/shields to use means we are
choosing to have a worse map because it doesn’t conform to expected local
customs; or worse, or we are ignoring the confusion brought by these mismatches
in renderings (eg, police icons are uniform, road shields are uniform, etc )
as not a problem that needs addressing in OSM directly (ie: let -carto worry
about it)
I know some of this could be done by regional choices in how -carto renders
certain tags ( Maybe a new railway=high_speed_rail in Japan is rendered
differently), but it seems that more fine grain control over badges would be a
better long term solution for everything.
if we make the tags and the proper references in OSM, and then submit the
proper bitmap/vector file to -carto (whatever it is that is needed), then
wouldn’t this be a good solution to remedy the generic ovals found in the
-carto render, and supply even more information to database users?
Is limiting it to shields for roads to start with make it somewhat more
manageable, or is the whole thing a bad idea from the start?
If we’re able to have information on what badge or shield (or whatever is
important) associated with an object in OSM, that information can be used by
all renderers, right?
Javbw
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