This page describes a historic artifact in the history of OpenStreetMap. It does not reflect the current situation, but instead documents the historical concepts, issues, or ideas.
About
Initial brainstorming about an Americentric renderer.
"[T]he last thing we need is a map that invites a direct comparison to Google Maps, because we can’t win that comparison. A road-centric, road atlas themed style would still make sense as part of a gallery or style switcher, to demonstrate the versatility of our data." -Minh
Right now, this is an unstructured wish list that hasn't been vetted by anyone:
Achieve a cartographic style that is consistent with North American maps of North America.
Parks, protected areas, and indigenous land boundaries (as borders), possibly with fallback to fills where there's no land cover
Differentiate protected areas by access
US-style street/road cartography
Increased emphasis on physical distinctions, e.g. paved vs unpaved style differences (possibly coloration, possibly dashed). Four levels:
Freeways / Super-twos
Paved
Unpaved, but graded
Unpaved and ungraded (two-track roads)
Reduced color distinction between classes of roads
Routes kept together at a particular zoom level
Labels offset from roads rather than squeezed between the casing
Muted color schemes for land cover
Pattern fills for "some" features (sand, scree, bare rock)
Better contrast (?)
Beach/shoal
Vector tiles
Maintain support for tagging that is in wide use
Promote mapper engagement
Wide rendering of POIs / icons
Micromapping at high zoom levels
Special icons for capitals of administrative divisions
Demonstrate integration of wikidata
Brand logos for businesses
Render labels of bus stops with route_ref=* (list of routes that stop there) instead of, or in addition to, name=*
Unresolved cartographic decisions
Should parks & protected areas be rendered as a fill or as a border?
Possible solution: render fill on the bottom, land cover in the middle, border on the top. This achieves the best of both worlds and still shows a fill when there's no land cover.
Tile server: OpenMapTiles. OpenMapTiles is a data schema and supporting imposm3, SQL, and scripts which build a tile file in the MapBox Vector Tiles (MVT) format as well as a postgres / PostGIS capable of running postserve.
Initially the schema will be a default build of OpenMapTiles hosted by MapTiler.
Additional custom layers will need to be developed to add elements not present in the out-of-the-box OpenMapTiles build.
For resource efficiency, a customized fork of OpenMapTiles will eventually be needed in order to filter the data down to what is actually used in the project.
A deployed capability will consist of two pieces:
A tiles.mbtiles which is periodically generated for the planet and re-deployed, for lower-level zooms, and served with tileserver-gl.
A postgres database which is minutely updated for higher-level zooms, and served with postserve.
We will attempt to contribute upstream to OpenMapTiles to the extent that our customizations are of global interest to the OpenMapTiles community.
Renderer: maplibre-gl-js
Style: The style is generated in javascript rather than external JSON files. This allows for programmatic access to the style and for refactoring copy/paste code.
Customization: Javascript code to customize features not possible in native maplibre-gl-js. This is expected to be used for highway shields.
Blockers
Pictorial highway shields in CartoCSS will need either a patch to, fork of, or alternative infrastructure to Carto (not osm-carto), because it currently doesn't have GroupSymbolizer support.
Part of United States mapping project.