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The current state of map design in OpenStreetMap

In the previous post i discussed a bit the history of digital map design, in particular also outside of OpenStreetMap. I also wrote in the past about the history of OpenStreetMap Carto, the cartographic face of OpenStreetMap and without doubt the most influential map design project in OpenStreetMap – today as well as historically.

context dependent orientation of train station and saddle symbols visualization of view directions of viewpoints importance rating of peaks and parkings based on isolation curved labeling of polygons But it is also visible, that despite Americana being a relatively young and not yet feature complete project by its own goals, it already struggles significantly with the technical limitations of the map rendering framework used and the commercially developed data schema it is built on. Many of the projects mentioned show no or very little activity in recent years and practically all of them in some way struggle with the technical limitations of the tools used and quite a few resort to pretty exotic methods of script generating style rules to be able to develop the design they use.

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