[mkgmap-dev] Railway tracks drawn around station buildings

Mon Feb 9 14:45:38 GMT 2015

Gerd Petermann <gpetermann_muenchen at hotmail.com> writes:

> I have no idea how the carto stylesheet works. I don't even know how it looks like.
> I guess this is used by the http://www.openstreetmap.org renderer?
> Please explain more detailed what you mean and how we could use it.

I didn't mean that mkgmap could use it.  One can look at the trunk of
the carto project as structurally similar to mkgmap in that it provides
a standard/default conversion.  The carto project seems to view their
default as being the default mapnik/carto render, and curates it to be
maximally useful for normal users (which is of course a hard thing to do
and unclear if it's ever right, but the point is that they try).

So, what I meant is that IMHO mkgmap should view the default style the
same way, as providing the best conversion known to the mkgmap
developers, where "best" means the conversion that is most useful to a
user with no special desires running on some typical class of devices.
The device target probably would be something reasonably modern, like an
oregon or etrex 30 or a nuvi from the last few years, although I haven't
found that anything newer than a Etrex Vista HCx to be all that
different.

> reg. options:
> I agree that the defaults are not very useful, esp. if you want a routable map.
> I see no simple way to change that without creating trouble for existing users.

My notion is basically that if someone pops up and says "I want to
convert for a modern garmin and get all the features that are
supported", then what's recommended for them should be the default.

If people who don't want routable maps (or don't want something else)
have to add --no-route, I think that's ok, and it's better to make a few
people do that than to make almost everyone jump through hoops,
searching around for lengthy sets of command-line arguments.

Is anyone on the list actually trying to build non-routable maps?  I
would be curious as to why.

> One idea:
> We might provide a few commented sample configuration files, e.g.
> one for car-routing , one for bicycle-routing, and one without routing.

Ideally these would just be styles (unless there are games for computing
bicyles routes in car mode).   But sure, that sounds reaasonable.

Still, invoking mkgmap with no special options and the default style
should produce a map that works well for car routing when used in car
mode on normal devices.

I find that mkgmap is close to unique among programs I run into; it
seems very normal for what the development team thinks is the best mode
to be default.

THanks for listening!
Greg
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