Posts filed under 'OSM'
Everyone likes stickers, especially when they’re Moo custom-printed stickers. Click the button below, using Moo’s new XML API, to start creating cool stickerbooks from the OSM and OCM logos. Just for fun, I’ve thrown in my icons too 
Make cool stickers out of icons!
Update: The images on the chooser page look a bit pony, but don’t worry; thats an aliasing artefact. Also, there is currently a problem with transparent PNGs which give the images a black background, but the guys at Moo are working on a fix.
September 29th, 2008
More icons! And this time they’re PD licensed.
The fire station / department icon is now less suggestive. Unless you’ve got a really, really dirty mind
The police, convenience and synagogue icons have been touched-up to render better at 16×16.
Several new icons have been added:
- School: A chalkboard seems an obvious icon (although most schools probably use whiteboards now), with a simple sum on it. The alternative, using “ABC”, seems a bit latin alphabet centric.
- Hindu temple: Uses a PD “Om” symbol from wikimedia commons.
- Pastafarian: Just for laughs. According to tagwatch, we don’t actually have any… yet.
- Sikh temple: Uses a PD “Khanda” symbol, again from wikimedia commons.
- Pharmacies: Both dispensing and non-dispensing according to what seems to be the common convention.
- Post box: Its supposed to be a letter going into a slot, but it isn’t as clear as it could be.
- Telephone: This is a pretty standard-looking icon.
- Hotel: This is also pretty conventional, should be recognisable world-wide.
- Taxi rank: Represents a taxi cab… Given that a 16×16 icon is too small to use text, I hope that the car with a little “bump” on the top is recognisable in most countries.
Enjoy!
September 29th, 2008
I’ve done a little more work on a consistent, high-zoom icon set and here is release 0.2. Here’s a sample of what the icons look like, although its best to see them on a real map to get the full effect.
I know I’d like to see these on the map, which means they have to be tagged. At the moment we, as a community, aren’t doing very well at tagging things which aren’t rendered (but we’re very good at tagging things that are, e.g: pubs ). So, treat yourself and tag a nice restaurant today!
Update: I’ve had a special request for the airport icon without the shield, suitable for use at lower zoom levels, so here are the SVG and 
PNG files.
September 25th, 2008
Here is a short script to expire tiles based on osmchange diffs. Michal’s comment got me thinking about if there were an easy way to do it and today’s answer is yes, as long as you don’t mind it not being 100% accurate.
The script basically takes all the node locations in the diff, or referenced by ways in the diff, and expires the (meta)tile which contains that point. There are several problems with this approach:
- If a named node (e.g: a pub) is on the corner of a meta tile and its name is modified then the tile(s) containing the name should be expired as well.
- The non-local effects of mapnik’s text placement mean that changes to a way may affect its neigbours, meaning they should also be expired.
- If a way crosses the corner of a meta tile, but has no nodes within it, and is changed then that meta tile should be expired.
However, it seems to work well enough for me at the moment, although I reckon it is probably prudent to expire all the tiles every week or so, just to make sure.
Or the script can be easily extended to expire all the neighbours of expired meta tiles.
September 12th, 2008
I’ve been playing with the diff import for osm2pgsql, which now works wonderfully, and trying to set up a (nearly) live tile-server. To test it, I set it running over the weekend after the Euston micro mapping party, grabbing some tiles every hour and turning them into a movie. It covers the period from about 5pm Friday to 10am this morning with one frame per hour.
September 8th, 2008
After a bit of a quick and dirty hack, there is now a version of Mapnik capable of rendering SVG icons directly to the Cairo back-end. The result is a lovely print-quality map, such as this. Sadly, when I try to load it KPDF crashes. Xpdf is OK, but I don’t know about other renderers… I thought they were all based on poppler these days anyway.
I’ll spend some time cleaning up the new additions and hopefully this’ll make its way into Mapnik’s trunk real soon now.
August 20th, 2008
The icons seemed popular, so here are the original SVGs licensed under the CC-BY-SA license. Enjoy!
August 15th, 2008
I’ve been spending some free time trying to design an icon set for OpenStreetMap. There are several design goals for this icon set:
- They need to work, or nearly work, in black and white as well as colour. This is so they could be used in printed low-colour or greyscale maps.
- They should be visually identifiable by POI class, for rapid readability.
- They should all be the same size and “weight”, so that no single icon overwhelms the others.
You can grab the icons here, version 0.1, with icons for the following POIs; airports, ATMs, bars, cafés, parking, pubs, recycling points, restaurants, bus stops, places of worship (Buddhist temples, Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques) and supermarkets.
I’ve tried to keep the icon design consistent by using the same rounded-square outline for all the icons at 16×16 pixels. Each different class uses a different flat background colour, chosen to be distinct from all the others (although I should probably check they’re OK for colour-blind people). The icon classes are totally arbitrary, but I’ve been working with the following:
- Blue: transport.
- Orange: Food, drink and socialising.
- Green: Services and shops.
- Grey: Religious points-of-interest.
- Red: Emergency services.
All of the icon strokes are drawn in white on top and are supposed to be internationally recognisable, though some don’t quite live up to that. The pub icon, for example, shows the “nonic” style of pint glass which is common in the UK, but probably not elsewhere. On the other hand, the concept of a “pub” isn’t itself international, so maybe it doesn’t matter. There is an icon for a bar, when this is more appropriate, but I don’t think we have many of them tagged at the moment.
This screenshot shows how different the map looks when POIs like restaurants and cafés are rendered. Hopefully if these are rendered on a layer of the main map more people will start to tag these kinds of features.
Compare the above with the original, which looks rather barren by comparison:
Feedback, requests and suggestions are welcome. The set is still at a very early stage and is missing many icons, but I hope to make it complete at some point in the not-too-far future.
August 13th, 2008
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