Interesting map, it makes me want to make a poster out of it.
Since the map is (as far as I could see) a raster, does anyone have any recommendations on engines that can overlay information on maps (preferably open, ranging from svg + inkscape to a custom osm visualizer). I am just asking for curiosity's sake, nothing professional in mind here.
Wow, that's gorgeous. Something I'd been thinking of working on was a tool to produce really beautiful printed maps from the OSM data. The existing OSM renderers are screen-oriented and fairly utilitarian, and their output isn't nearly as pretty (or as high-resolution) as a good paper map. But the data is all there; it's just a matter of rendering it better. This is definitely in the direction that I was thinking of.
Probably QGIS if you are doing something data driven and want a big image as output (especially if the source data has geographic coordinates associated with it).
There are a few open map engines, I guess mapserver and mapnik are 2 of the more prominent ones, and now there are several implementations using OpenGL (aimed at tiled vector maps in browsers). But that is all more at the toolkit level rather than the application level.
For simple stuff, using leaflet to draw on top of OSM tiles is a nice solution.
A while back I thought about making my maps in QGIS, but found the stuff for styling the map just... lacking. It was a LOT easier to do what I wanted in Illustrator. But there was still the problem of getting the bare vectors into there for styling.
Holy grail for me would be some sort of OSM -> Affinity where I can define groups based on OSM tags.
On that note, one thing I've wanted to do for quite some time is an application that would allow you to open an image file or a set of image files with a particular style of map and it would try to replicate that style with OSM data. Ideally emitting that style in a Mapserver mapfile, or a Mapnik style file, or whatever. If you prefer German-style road atlases, you should be able to have them with OSM data. Doing such things by hand seems incredibly tedious, though.
I've long lamented how none of these are anywhere near as beautiful as a decent printed map. Some of the OSM projects (e.g. toposm) are better, but still not as good as (say) Rand-McNally or ADC. On my hope-to-do list is to write a renderer for OSM data that produces really beautiful maps meant for printing rather than viewing on a <100dpi screen.
Great link! I have looked into using SVG for mapping applications. It would simplify development of mapping apps. However, size of a country map with some detail can be pretty big, around 2Mb so it wouldn't play well on e.g. mobile apps where the vectors could come to use. Anyway, there are many free maps here to play with http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_maps
This is absolutely perfect! For a couple years now I've been looking for (and badly trying myself) to have a good way without paying quite a lot of money to create SVGs out of OpenStreetMap data!
Oh wow, the dynamic lighting on those maps look really nice! My initial goal was just to make printable maps in a hand drawn style really easy to create. Lots of people draw their own maps, then spend a huge amount of time adding in all that crosshatching manually, and I thought I could save people a bit of time. I've noticed a lot of these map making tools try to do everything and end up becoming really complicated, but I'm trying my best to avoid making it too hard to use. Essentially, most people seem to be trying to make Photoshop for maps, and I'm making Paint. A tool that anybody can open and use immediately without spending a bunch of time learning the system.
Sure, I just mentioned it in the off-chance it was good enough out of the box. Big jump from making a screenshot (or perhaps stitching a few together) to editing OSM vectors in QGIS/Inkscape, which others have mentioned already.
A pet project I've wanted to do for ages is to hack up a very high-detail (factoring in every road/footpath) isochrone map centred around my home, using openstreetmap data and render the result for a printshop at e.g. 600dpi to create a high quality map/poster
Any suggestions for the best (open) software to achieve this?
Really interesting project/product! It's really nice to see new ways of rendering OSM data, and alternative map services.
I am developing another way to run your own map server (without mapnik!) from a low-end computer (https://github.com/jamesrr39/ownmap-app in case you're interested), but a little bit different to you in that I'm currently focusing on rendering raster tiles. I'm really happy I saw this thread, however, I hadn't heard of the OSM Express, MBTiles or PMTiles formats before and was/am rolling my own format, so it's really interesting looking at some ideas from these.
Hey, great work! I'm currently working a mapping project, with smallish, customized maps. I'm wondering about your strategy for map tiling? Did OSM do it/provide an easy for you to tile the maps/download the tiles? Basically I'm looking for some software that will help me turn my own images into map tiles. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks! The map on the frontend side makes use of a nifty library called Leaflet, as well as Mapbox and OpenStreetMaps. On the backend side there's a bunch of python going on but that's part of the secret sauce. :)
Thanks! Yes, OpenRailwayMap is fun. I have an OSM rendering database sitting around on my server - one of these days I'm going to sit down and do a railway stylesheet for it...
Great write up! I've been working with maps lately and this was a very interesting read.
I've tried the Leaflet SVG layer and it can become quite slow when loaded with thousands of points.
Another approach would be to use a custom SVG layer overlay using CSS Transforms. I've used an SVG overlay with D3 and it was much faster at panning and zooming. It could handle ~30k points (and lots of lines) without a problem on my laptop.
Since the map is (as far as I could see) a raster, does anyone have any recommendations on engines that can overlay information on maps (preferably open, ranging from svg + inkscape to a custom osm visualizer). I am just asking for curiosity's sake, nothing professional in mind here.
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