On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Tels <nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com> wrote:
On Thursday 30 July 2009 09:13:37 Daniel Kinzler
wrote:
Hi all
I'm wondering if any thought has been given to rendering maps to SVG.
I'm asking that especially in the light of
<http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/svg-for-all-with-flash/> which
might give use in-browser display of SVG, and perhaps even
interactive SVG. Using that with OSM would be really cool!
Now, afaik Mapnik supports SVG rendering. But I suspect that
interactive vector maps would work differently from interactive
pixel-based maps: you could scale smoothly, could use much bigger
tiles, and would use level-of-detail layers instead of pre-scaled
tiles...
Does somethign like that exist yet?
I toyed around with the idea, but I think SVG would not be able to
handle a few hundred thousand objects that you get on zooming to level
11 and lower. Someone prove me wrong please :)
The trick, surely, is to filter the data at that zoom level so that you
don't try to render too much.
When used with tiles@home, Osmarender renders place names for low zoom
levels by working with a filtered dataset[1]. The place names are then
superimposed on top of a captionless tileset that is derived by a separate
process.
This link shows tiles containing just place names (major cities and
countries) at zoom 5:
http://informationfreeway.org/?lat=46.392704527927286&lon=9.36131696056…
You can imagine that it would be just as easy to render major features like
coastlines and motorways using the same technique.
80n
[1] Providing such filtered datasets are one of the primary purposes of XAPI