Hello Dane,
2012/3/29 Dane Springmeyer <address@hidden>:
> In the meantime also give consideration to taking another approach: what if Mapnik could provide a list of all street names placed and rendered in a given tile so that your street index generation could intelligently drop the ones that were never placed? I realize the issues is not just the mismatch between the index listing and the rendered labels but also that you want as many labeled as possible.
Exactly! We want to put *all* the streets in both the index and the map.
> But it still might be useful since even after many potential improvements to fit more labels I can imagine potential mismatches. Without metadata about the exact names actually placed by Mapnik I cannot imagine a perfect solution.
We do not think it is possible to produce a perfect solution. But at
least we
would like to have an imperfect one that could possibly be
manually improved (e.g. manually move labels on the vectorized version
of the map for example).
In fact, the best automatic strategy for us might be:
* Try line placement,
* If it fails, try point placement without overlap,
* If it fails do point placement with overlap.
Now, I don't know what could be the best API between Mapnik and
MapOSMatic in order to achieve that. Having feedback on labels not
placed might help, I don't know.
Best regards,
david