Mateusz Konieczny's Diary

New road style for the Default map style, the full version - high zoom

Posted by Mateusz Konieczny on 10 August 2015 in English.

highway=pedestrian/living_street is this comparison was set to pale gray/gray version. Reported problems were fixed, resulting in new shield colors, tweaked road color and subtler casings. Thanks for the feedback!

This comparison is using latest version of style, newer than one used on the OSM website. The most important change is the new forest style.

For start: place that had problem with too strong casing resulting in problems with bridge that was not sufficiently different from other sections of roads. It is now improved - and now it should be OK.

What is preferable? Large images or smaller ones next to each other (like in the previous entry)? Or maybe big pictures next to each other - but available as links and not inlined (like many in this older entry)?

Problems

Default OSM style is displaying huge amount of information. Here is image of displayed road types on some of landcovers. Note that due to size limitation effects of service tags (that would tripple different road styles) are not displayed.

Full image

New road style fixes problems with certain road types invisible on common landcovers, but there are still some situations where road is too close to landcover. Unfortunately, as result of huge amount of landcovers it is not easily fixable - but new problems are a bit less severe than old “trunk is invisible in forests, secondary is invisible on farmland”.

highway=motorway through landuse=military is poor

highway=secondary shield is almost the same as the heath color

highway=secondary is close to natural=beach

Discussion

Comment from imagico on 10 August 2015 at 16:06

General roads look quite fine now. Would be even better with the brighter farmland of course. ;-)

The new pedestrian color you tried looks very close to landuse=residential.

Comment from Mateusz Konieczny on 10 August 2015 at 16:14

The new pedestrian color you tried looks very close to landuse=residential.

Yes, this is “too close to highway=residential” variant, mentioned in previous entry (osm.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35555 - “highway=pedestrian, highway=living_street” section)

Comment from Mateusz Konieczny on 10 August 2015 at 16:22

And “new farmland color - makes farmland less prominent” is here: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1701

Comment from Robert Whittaker on 10 August 2015 at 16:28

You’ve made highway=unclassified and highway=residential narrower than they currently are – presumably to distinguish them from highway=tertiary, which is now the same colour. That’s fine in general, but when road names are displayed on these roads, the font used in the examples above, doesn’t seem to fit nicely inside the road casings. I’d suggest either reducing the font size or increasing the road widths slightly, to get a better fit.

It’s ok with the overhanging lettering on z=15 when there isn’t much other detail to see, but I’d do something on z=16,17,18,19. A bit of overhang on z=16 would probably be ok, but I’d go for less than you currently have. On 17 I’d probably make the font a bit smaller, and on 18 and 19 make the unclassified and residential roads slightly wider.

Comment from nebulon42 on 10 August 2015 at 18:29

Looks really great! Just one point that I spotted: While the stronger casing of secondary roads looks great on higher zooms I think it is too strong at z11 and z12. At z12 this causes some “artefacts” like in your rendering of Market Weighton. Maybe you could start out subtler and then move to a stronger casing on higher zooms.

Comment from Mateusz Konieczny on 10 August 2015 at 18:34

overhanging lettering

I am not considering this as something ugly, unlike too wide streets.

For example in

I am considering left as ugly - result of too wide streets.

Wide streets also may make map misleading - see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/811 and https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/286 that are fixable only by making roads narrower.

Comment from Mateusz Konieczny on 10 August 2015 at 18:35

OK, #811 is fixable also by other means - but making roads narrower reduces impact.

Comment from Mateusz Konieczny on 10 August 2015 at 18:50

At z12 this causes some “artefacts” like in your rendering of Market Weighton.

What kind of artefact appears on z12?

In this images there are artefacts on z11 - but it was a bug that I just fixed (unwanted line in primary tunnels is now also gone but it may appear on some pictures presented here).

Comment from Minh Nguyen on 10 August 2015 at 21:24

Interesting choice of silver shields for highway=tertiary. Have you applied the same shield style to lower-classed roads, like highway=unclassified? The current style (bold label with no shield) is far too prominent anyways.

Comment from Minh Nguyen on 10 August 2015 at 23:01

That color matrix image is gorgeous, by the way.

Comment from nebulon42 on 11 August 2015 at 06:32

What kind of artefact appears on z12?

With “artefact” I meant that on z11 the thinness of the outline and the high contrast between fill colour and casing colour let the road appear with a rather jagged outline, which does not look too good (at least in your renderings here, maybe its different on the map). The same is true for z12, but the problem is less amplified. Then it gets better.

This could be solved by starting with a less dark casing colour on z11-12 and then gradually moving towards the current colour on higher zooms or reducing contrast between casing colour and fill colour altogether for all zoom levels. But I rather like the stronger casings on higher zooms so better to keep them and tweak the lower zooms a bit.