OpenStreetMap Carto 2.33.0 has been released. This release focuses on cartographic style improvements, but the release notes also include 2.32.0.

The biggest changes are

• A randomized symbology for forests for natural=wood and landuse=forest #1728 #1242

  A long time in the works, this improvement has finally landed. The two tags were merged - they are indistinguishable to the data consumer. A randomized symbology was first suggested by SK53 at SOTM-EU 2014, and this feature would not have happened without his extensive research, or imagico tools for creating an irregular but uniformly distributed and periodic dot pattern

• Rendering minor roads and service rail later for mid-zoom clarity #1682 #1692 #1676 #1647

  As all residential, unclassified, and service roads in a city became mapped the rendered view became over-crowded, bloblike, and difficult to read.

• Unification of footway/path and rendering surface of them

  The mess that is highway=path is well-known, and it is necessary to do some kind of processing as a data consumer. A distinction is now made between paved and unpaved footways.

• Rendering of Antartic ice sheets from shapefiles #1540

  Ice sheets in Antartica are a bit of a special case, and pre-generated shapefiles are now used

• Mapnik 3 preperations #1579

  The style is not yet fully tested with Mapnik 3 and we don’t claim to support it, but several bugs were fixed. Most of the work was done on the Mapnik side

• No longer rendering proposed roads #1663 #1654

• Power area colour adjusted #1680

• Better place label order #1689

• meadow/grassland and orchard/vineyard color unification #1655

• Render educational area borders later #1662

• New POI icons

A full list of changes can be found on Github