You customise the style using "TYP" files. I've found this a good place to start: http://www.cferrero.net/maps/guide_to_TYPs.html

I should also mention that, if you do get as far as making GPS trails, there are probably a few people willing to do some armchair-based work of drawing roads to match. Contact the talk-ie mailing list at http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ie

Getting help from the postman is an excellent idea. They are likely to cover nearly every road, good and bad, and produce the GPS "trails" from which maps can be produced. With a GPS logger there's very little actual work involved — just leaving it on the dashboard of the van should be fine. If you know any local hikers or hill-walkers, they can do the same to produce trails of off-road paths.

You then copy the trails off the logger and upload it to OpenStreetMap. From those trails alone we can draw a fairly good map showing the network of roads and paths themselves, but it will require additional local knowledge afterwards to add the extra details, like street names or route numbers (R123, etc). Adding this "metadata" isn't too hard — anyone can do it through the web interface on openstreetmap.org. Just remember not to copy an Ordnance Survey map because (a) it's copyright, and (b) it's not always correct anyway!

Once you have a reasonable street/path map, the second stage is to decide what other features you want to gather for the map. I'm guessing that, particularly for tourism, you'll want to include hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, shops, churches, Garda stations, and so on. Through the web interface, you can just click to add these details at approximate locations, which is a good start. For more precise locations, most GPS loggers have a button to record points-of-interest which will show up as marks in the trails (you just need to remember yourself afterwards why you clicked the button at the time :).

Hi Edward,

I wasn't in Tipperary town itself this time, but I'll bear it in mind for the future. We had a great time in the hotel we stayed in, so we'll almost certainly be going back.

Cheers,

Andrew

No idea, I'm afraid. I'm now running the same version of Firefox, and it's fine. Are you putting any quotes around anything? It looks like Firefox is translating the spaces to %20, which seems to happen if you quote things.

Odd, the bookmark cuts off half-way. Maybe the less-than sign? Trying again!

javascript:var%C2%A0s='%s'; url='http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Tiles/info.php?x=%s&y=%s&z=%s'; t=''; qc=0; chunks=url.split('%s'); for(i=0; i<s.length; i++){if(s.charAt(i)=='%22')qc=qc^1; t+=((s.charAt(i)==' '&&qc)?'^':s.charAt(i)); }args=t.split(/\s/); nurl=''; for(i=0; i<chunks.length; i++){nurl+=chunks[i]; if(args[i]!=undefined)%C2%A0{args[i]=args[i].replace(/\^/g,' '); nurl+=args[i]; }}location.replace(nurl,'< BR>');

Hi Finnán,

That's a pretty spectacular improvement! If I remember right there was only the N24 on the map when you started? I think I need to resurrect my own bike. This walking stuff is just too slow :)

Cheers,

Andrew

Okay, I have the second stage running fine now. I suspect I was running the wrong lowzoom script. It'll take an hour or so to run, and then probably another hour to get through the queue, but it'll be worth it ;)

I see some tiles have rather ugly-looking blank squares in them, which are due to missing data in the database. These are, it seems, automatically added to the low-priority queue for regenerating, so that later they'll be there. Unfortunately, later might be a few weeks!

Odd. I've looked again, and the background isn't grey, it's transparent. The grey you're seeing is the browser's background. This is specified in the default layers.conf:
Layer.lowzoom.Transparent=1

On the other hand, when I tried to follow the Wiki instructions here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Tiles%40home/lowzoom
I managed to run the first stage, but not the second. When I tried, it died, saying that zoom 8 has been included in the tilesGen.pl, so I figured the Wiki may have been out-of-date.

Does anyone know for sure what the actual procedure should be?

Thanks!

Hi Finnán!

I've only started recently myself in Athy, but am slowly building up streets here and there. My bike needs a bit of work, so it's either the car (not suitable for doing local streets, really) or walking for now. There's a talk-ie mailing list which is a bit quiet, but no harm to say hello there too, and be sure to check out the Ireland wiki page which has some good guidelines on classifying Irish roads.

Have fun!

Andrew